Modern Classics of Science Fiction

by Gardner Dozois

  A clay trifle. I’ve learned since then that they carve such trash down in Penn, to sell to travelers for souvenirs, and likely it came from there. It was given me by my mother, or by somebody in the house where I was born, for I’m told it was on a string around my neck when I was taken to the orphanage, and there they laughed at it some but let me keep it. Emmia was often curious about it – such things aren’t common in Moha. Once, when we were looking for hens’ eggs in the barn loft, she caught hold of it and asked me, a bit red-faced and whispery, if I knew what it meant. I was thirteen; it was before I’d seen her in her window. I knew and didn’t know what she meant, was scared of the difference in her face and of the queer sweet-smelling warmth that reached me from her nearness, and so nothing came of what might have been a lively hour if my thoughts had grown a little closer toward those of a man. Oh, I don’t believe in luck-charms nowadays. Luck, good or bad, simply happens; you can’t make it, or push it around with charms and words and all that jibberty-mumble. But in those days I more than half believed in it. And since I did, it helped to stop my trembling, as I carried out that half-loaf to – him. Carried it out, knowing with not a trace of doubt what I ought to do, meant to do, what the law said I must do.

  He didn’t reach for it. Those nostril-slits flared, though, and his gaze followed my fingers like a dog’s when I broke off a small piece of the bread and ate it myself. I held out the rest to him and he accepted it, carried it to his pitiful mouth. I got a glimpse of his teeth, brownish, small, close-set, weak-looking. He gnawed awkwardly. His eyes never left me as he munched, and snuffled, and slobbered. He kept grunting, “Good, good!” and trying to smile with his mouth full. Merciful winds, it was nothing but common oat bread! And with all that fat, he couldn’t have been going hungry.

  At fourteen I couldn’t understand that it wasn’t bread he was starved for. I know it now.

  The bread gone, he gave his wet mouth a swipe and said: “You come me now? Good things. Show good things, I.” He walked a few steps up the ledge, looking back. Like a dog.

  * * *

  Yes, I followed him.

  He walked better than I expected. His knees could bend only a few inches, but the stub legs were powerful to hold up all that weight, and they could pump along at surprising speed. On the level, it was a stiff-legged waddle. But on the steep ground, as we climbed around toward the northern side of the mountain, his arms would swing forward touching the earth, a four-legged scramble that carried him up the rises about as fast as I cared to walk. And he was quiet, in the same way I’d learned to go quiet in the woods. He knew this country, got his living out of it, must have known it a good while. I couldn’t guess his age, however, and hardly tried to.

  North Mountain mue, I’ve got no other name for him. He would never have owned one. What the hell, like other orphanage kids I never had a last name myself, and don’t miss it. I’m just Davy.

  Don’t think my kindness – if it was kindness, that business with the bread – came from anything good in me. It didn’t. It came partly from fear, partly from an ugly sort of planning. From the year of teaching by the priests that every child in Moha is required to sweat out before he’s twelve, and from the Bull and Iron tales, I knew that mues weren’t in the same class with demons or ghosts or elves, but solid flesh in spite of being the get of devils. They couldn’t vanish or float through walls; they didn’t have the evil eye. If you got near one you’d see and smell him, he couldn’t use spells or witch-signs (though his father might) because God wouldn’t allow that to a miserable mue, and he would die for good when you put a knife in him. The law said when, not if. It said you must if you could; if you couldn’t, you must notify the Church at once, so that he could be hunted down by men properly equipped and with the protection of a priest.

  I walked on behind him, up through the deeper forest on the north side of the mountain, and more and more I hated and resented him, cursing the luck that made me the one to find him, imagining his demon father behind every tree, and sickened the way anyone might be sickened by ugliness, terror, strangeness and a foul smell.

  We reached a level area, a flanking ridge of the mountain’s north side where the trees stood great and old, spaced well apart but casting thick shade from interlacing branches. Most of them were pines, that through the years had built a heavy carpet; here anyone could walk soft as a breeze. My ears, and they are keen, could barely hear the mue a few steps ahead of me as his blobby feet pressed the pine needles. I myself moved more quietly than that. I felt that he didn’t like it here. He could shamble along faster on sloping ground. In this place anything could overtake him. He padded on at his best poor speed, with constant glances to left and right – truly like someone who knew nothing more about the shadows than I did.

  The stories didn’t say there was always a demon attending a mue.

  It would be easiest, and I knew it, here on the level. Six inches of double-edge Katskil steel, honed to the limit as mine always was, will go through anything made of flesh. I was watching the best spot, below his last rib on the left side. If a no-way human thing, or being, was observing us, he or it might read my thought. It might not be in animal shape at all. But as for the mue – well, if I failed to kill at the first stab, at least I’d have time to dodge his frightful arms, and run faster than he could hope to do, while the blood drained out of him. Mue blood. Devil-fathered blood.

  I slid my knife free. I lowered it quickly out of sight inside the mouth of my sack, afraid he might turn suddenly before I was ready, afraid of other eyes. I lessened the distance between us, calculating angles, arm length, the lie of the ground. It would be best if I stooped slightly and drove my knife upward.

  He coughed slightly, a little throat-clearing, a completely human sound. It hurt me somehow, angered me too, for surely he had no right to do things in the human way. Anyhow there was no hurry; plenty more of this partly open area where it would be safest to do it. I saw no change in the tree-pattern up ahead. I told myself to wait till I felt more ready. I told myself how easy it would be. Just wait a minute …

  I saw myself back at the Bull and Iron telling my true-tale. I wouldn’t brag, nay, I’d speak with a noble calm. I could afford it. I’d be the Yardboy Who Killed A Mue.

  They would send out a mission, priests, hunters and soldiers, to find the body and verify my story. I’d go along, and they’d find it. A skeleton, with those awful leg-bones, would be enough – and that’s all it would be, for in the time it took the mission to argue and get going, the carrion-ants would finish what other scavengers began, the old necessary wilderness housecleaning. The skeleton would do. They’d set out doubting me, snickering behind their hands. Then the laughers would look sick, and I’d be a hero.

  It came to me that this was no gaudy daydream of the kind that had filled my head with rosy mists at other times. This was what would happen in sober fact. I’d be questioned and examined afterward by the priests, maybe the Bishop of Skoar, the Mayor, even the Colonel of the army garrison. Why, possibly the Kurin family, absolute tops in the Skoar aristocracy, would hear of me and want to learn more. If they liked me, I’d be a bondservant no longer. With them for my patrons I’d be the same as rich.

  I would go to Levannon, on a roan horse. Two attendants – no, three, one to ride ahead and make sure of a room for me at the next inn, never mind who had to be tossed out; and a maid-servant to bathe me and keep the bed warm. In Levannon I would buy me a ship, a thirty-tonner. And wouldn’t I wear a green hat with a hawk’s feather, a red shirt of Penn silk, my loin cloth silken too, none of your damned scratchy linsey rags, maybe white with small golden stars and crosses! Real leather moccasins with ornaments of brass.

  I saw Old Jon Robson ashamed of past unkindness but quick to get in on the glory. I’d let him. It would suit my dignity. Clickety-yak, he knew all along the boy had wonderful stuff in him, only needed an opportunity to bring it out, what he’d always said, clickety-clickety, and me looking calm, friendly, a little bit
bored. Poor Old Jon!

  And Emmia: “Davy, weren’t you terrified? O Davy darling, what if he’d killed you?” Maybe not just “darling”; maybe she’d call me “Spice,” which girls didn’t say in my native city unless they meant come-take-it. “Davy, Spice, what if I’d lost you?” “Nay, Emmia, it wasn’t anything. I had to do it.” So, since she’d called me that, it wasn’t the taproom where she spoke, but her bedroom, and she’d let down her lovely hair to cover the front of her in make-believe modesty, but I put my hands below her chin – you know, gentle, nevertheless the hands that had killed a mue – parting that flowing softness to let the pink flower-tips peep through …

  The mue halted and turned to me. “Bad place,” he said, pointing at some of the enormous trees, to remind me how anything might lurk behind them. “No fear, boy-man. Bad thing come, I help, I.” He tapped the bulges of his right arm. “Fight big, you, I. You, I – word? – fra – fre –”

  “Friends,” I said, or my voice said it for me.

  “Friends.” He nodded, satisfied, turned his broad back to me and went on.

  I pushed my knife into its sheath and did not draw it again that day.

  * * *

  The big-tree region ended. For a while our course slanted downhill through smaller growth; now and then a gap in the tree cover let me glance out across rolling land to the north and east. Then we came to a place where the master growth was no longer trees but the wild grape. Monstrous vines looped and clung in their slow violence throughout a stand of maple and oak, the trees twisted into tortured attitudes by the ceaseless pressure. Many of the trees were dead but still provided firm columns to uphold their murderers. In the upper shadows I saw flashes of brilliance, not birds but the flowers called orchids whose roots grow on the branches never touching earth. Moss hung there too, a gray-green strangeness; I had never seen more than a little of it on the Skoar side of the mountain, but here it grew dense, making me think of dusty curtains swaying to a breeze I could not feel.

  In this man-forgotten place, the mue stopped, glanced up into the vine-bound branches and studied my legs and arms, bothered. “You can’t,” he said, and showed me what he meant by catching a loop of vine and swarming up hand over hand till in a moment he was thirty feet above ground. There he swung, and launched his great bulk across a gap, catching another loop, and another. A hundred feet away, he shifted his arms so quickly I could not follow the motion, and came swinging back above me. Now I’m clever in the trees, but my arms are merely human, not that good. He called down softly: “You go ground? Not far. Bad thing come, I help quick.”

  So I went ground. It was nasty walking – thicket, groundvines, fallen branches, dead logs where fire-ants would be living. The fat black-and-gold orb-spiders liked this place and had their dainty-looking homes everywere; their bite can’t kill, but will make you wish it would. I had to think of snake and scorpion too, and listen for any noise in the brush that wasn’t my own. I struggled through maybe a quarter-mile of that stuff, knowing the mue was near me but often unable to see or hear him, before I came up against a network of cat-brier, and there I was stopped.

  Ten-foot elastic stems, tougher than moose-tendon and barbed every inch, growing so close they’d built a sort of basket-weave. Brown tiger himself, with his shoe-leather hide and three inches of fur, would never try it. Then beyond that barricade I saw what could have been the tallest tree in Moha.

  A tulip tree twelve feet through at the base and I’m not lying. The wild grape had found it long ago and gone rioting up into the sunshine, but might not kill the giant for another hundred years. My mue was up there, calling, pointing out a place on my side where a stem of the vine thick as my wrist grew up straight for thirty feet and connected with the strands around the tulip tree. Well, that I could manage. I shinnied up, and worked over to the great tree along a dizzy-sagging horizontal vine. The mue grasped my foot and set it gently on a solid branch.

  As soon as he was sure of my safety he began climbing, and I followed – I don’t know how far up, call it sixty feet more. It was easy enough, like a ladder. The side-branches had become smaller, the vine-leaves thicker in the increase of sunshine, when we reached an obstruction of crossed sticks and interwoven vine. No eagle’s nest as I foolishly thought at first – no bird ever moved sticks of that size.

  The mue walked out on the branch below this structure and hoisted himself to the next limb. Up beside him, I could understand it. A nest, yes, five feet across, built on a double crotch, woven as shrewdly as any willow basket I ever saw in the Corn Market, and thickly lined with gray moss. He let himself down into his home and his sad mouth grinned. I grinned back – I couldn’t help it – and followed, with more caution than I needed, for the thing was solid as a house. It was a house.

  * * *

  He talked to me.

  I felt no sense of dreaming, as people sometimes say they do in a time of strangeness. But didn’t you, in childhood, play the game of imaginary countries? Promise yourself, say, that if you passed through the gap of a forked tree-trunk you’d be in a different world? Then if you did in the flesh step through such a tree, you learned that you must still rely on make-believe, didn’t you? And that hurt, some. It cut a few of the threads of your fancy. But suppose that after passing through your tree-fork, you had been met in solid truth by – oh, a gnome, dragon, fairy-tale princess.… But time moved curiously for me there in the mue’s nest, and all the inner life of me – thought, vision, ignorance, wonder – was the life of someone who had not existed before that day. I think we never do know yesterday any better than we know tomorrow.

  He was fingering my shirt. “Cloth?” he said, and I nodded. “Is beautiful.” A rarely dirty old shirt, I’d patched it myself a dozen times. But he liked that word “beautiful” and to him I suppose it meant many things it wouldn’t to you or me. “See you before,” he told me. “Times ago.”

  He must have meant he’d watched me secretly on my other visits to North Mountain, from high in a tree or rock-still in a thicket. To guess it would have scared me gutless; learning of it now I only felt silly, me with my sharp eyes and ears and nose – studied all this time and never a hint of it.

  Then he was telling me about his life. I won’t try to record much of his actual talk, the jumbled half-swallowed words, pauses when he could find no word at all. Some of it I couldn’t understand, gaps that caught no light from my few clumsy questions.

  He was born somewhere in the northeast. He waved that way; from our height, it was all a green sea under sunshine. He said “ten sleeps,” but I don’t know what distance he could have covered in a day at the time he left his birthplace. His mother, evidently a farm woman, had born him secretly in a cave in the woods. “Mother’s man die before that” – I think he was speaking of his father, or should I say the man who would have been his father if he had not been devil-begotten?

  Describing his mother, all he could say was “Big, good.” I could piece it out from Bull and Iron tales. She must have been some strapping stout woman who’d been able to hide her pregnancy in the early months. The law says every pregnancy must be reported to the authorities at once, no pregnant woman may ever be left alone after the fifth month, and a priest must always be present at the birth to do what’s necessary if the birth should be a mue. She evaded that somehow – maybe the death of her husband made it simpler – and bore him and nursed him in secret, raised him to some age between eight and ten with no help except that of a great dog.

  The dog was probably one of the tall gray wolfhounds that farm families need if they live outside the village stockade. The bitch guarded the baby constantly while his mother could not be with him, and grew old while he grew up, his closest companion, nurse, friend.

  His mother taught him speech, what he had of it, weakened now by years of disuse. Above all, she taught him that he was different, that he must live always in the woods and forever avoid human beings because they would kill him if they found him. She taught him to get
a living from the wilderness, hunting, snaring, learning the edible plants and avoiding the poisonous; how to stalk; more important, how to hide. Then, some time between his eighth and tenth year as I understood it – “she come no more.”

  He waited a long while. The dog stayed with him of course, hunted with him and for him, never let him out of her sight until – grown old no doubt but unchanging in devotion because the gray wolfhounds are like that – she was killed fighting off a wild boar.

  After that he knew or felt that his mother must have died too, and he had to go away. He couldn’t explain the need – “I must go, I.” So he made his journey of ten sleeps. I tried to ask him about years. He knew the world dimly, but had never thought of counting the times when the world cooled into the winter rains. Looking back, guessing, I believe he wasn’t much more than twenty-five.

  During the journey often sleeps a hunter had sighted him, shot an arrow into his back, loosed a dog at him. “I must kill the dog, I.” He lifted his stub hands with the fingers curling tightly inward to show me how it had been done. A harsh lesson, and it hurt him to remember it, that proof of his mother’s teaching, that dogs can sometimes be almost as dangerous as men. “Then man come for me with sharp-end stick, man beautiful.” That word again. And again his hands came up, the fingers squeezing life out of a remembered throat. After which he trembled and covered his face, but was watching me I think through a slit between those same curious fingers.

  I said: “I would not kill you.”

  When his hands fell I thought he looked puzzled, as though he had known that all along, no cause for me to say it.

  * * *

  “I show you good thing.” He was solemn, lifting himself from the nest and climbing down the tree, this time all the way to the ground. Here a floor of smallish rocks made a circle spreading five or six feet from the base of the tree to the edge of the complete cat-brier barrier, a little fortress. The rocks were all about a foot in diameter, most of them with a flattened part, overlapping so that the brier had no chance to force its way through them. Nature never builds a rock-pile like that; I knew who had – and what a labor, searching out the size and kind he wanted, hundreds of them, transporting them up and down his grape-vine path!