The Avram Davidson Treasury

by Avram Davidson

  She stiffened. Then she clutched at him. The other Fathers and Mothers ceased speaking and moving. At the entrance the Keeper sat up. “What is it?” he called. There was alarm in his voice, and it quavered.

  “A strange sound,” said a Father. “Keeper, listen!” Then—“Slaves?” he whispered.

  The Keeper moved his head from side to side. The Fathers and Mothers were all quite still. “I hear nothing,” Keeper said, uncertainly.

  “Keeper, you are old, your senses are dulled,” the deep-voiced Father said. “We say there is a strange noise! There is danger! Go and see—go now!”

  The Keeper became agitated. “I may not leave,” he protested. “It is The Race which orders me to stay here—”

  Fathers and Mothers together cried out at him. “The Race! The Race! We are The Race! Go and find out the danger to Us!”

  “The One-Eye-where is the One-Eye? I will send him!” But they cried that the One-Eye had left (as, indeed, one of them had), and so, finally, gibbering and muttering, he lumbered up the passageway.

  As soon as he had left, the milk-voiced Mother began to caress and stroke the One-Eye, saying that he was clever and good, that his breath was sweet, that—

  “There is no time for that, Mother,” she was interrupted. “Tell him the secret. Quick! Quick!”

  “Before you were made a One-Eye and were set apart to serve Us, with whom did you first mate?” she asked.

  “With the sisters in my own litter, of course.”

  “Of course…for they were nearest. And after that, with the mother of your own litter. Your sire was perhaps an older brother. After that you would have mated with daughters, with aunts …”

  “Of course.”

  The Mother asked if he did not know that this incessant inbreeding could eventually weaken The Race.

  “I did not know.”

  She lifted her head, listened. “The stupid Keeper is not returning yet. Good… It is so, One-Eye. Blindness, deafness, deformation, aborting, madness, still-births. All these occur from time to time in every litter. And when flaw mates with flaw and no new blood enters the line, The Race weakens. Is it not so, Fathers and Mothers?”

  They answered, “Mother, it is so.”

  The One-Eye asked, “Is this, then, the secret? A Father told me that the secret was a good thing, and this is a bad thing.”

  Be silent, They told him, and listen.

  In her milk-rich voice the Mother went on, “But We are not born of the same litter, We are not sib, not even near kin. From time to time there is a choosing made of the strongest and cleverest of many litters. And out of these further selections. And then a final choosing—eight, perhaps, or ten, or twelve. With two, or at most, three males to be Fathers, and the rest females. And these, the chosen of the best of the young, are taken to a place very far from the outside, very safe from danger, and a Keeper set to guard them, and One-Eyes set apart to bring them food and water …”

  A Father continued the story. “It is of Ourselves that We are talking. They bound Us together, tied Us tightly with many knots, tail to tail together, so that it was impossible to run away. We had no need to face danger above, no need to forage. We had only to eat, to drink, to grow strong—and you see that we are far larger than you—and to mate. All this as The Race has ordered.”

  “I see… I did not know. This is a good thing, yes. It is wise.”

  The Mothers and Fathers cried out at this. “It is not good!” They declared. “It is not wise! It is not right! To bind Us together when We were young and unknowing was well, yes. But to keep Us bound now is not well. We, too, would walk freely about! We would see the goldshining and the slaves, not to stay bound in the dimness here!”

  “One-Eye!” They cried. “You were set apart to serve Us—”

  “Yes,” he muttered. “I will bring water.”

  But this was not what They wanted of him. “One-Eye,” They whispered, “good, handsome, clever, young, sweet-breathed One-Eye. Set Us free! Unloose the knots! We cannot reach them, you can reach them—”

  He protested. “I dare not!”

  Their voices rose angrily. “You must! It is The Race which orders! We would rule and We will rule and you will rule with Us!”

  “…mate with Us!” In his ear, a Mother’s voice. He shivered.

  Again, they spoke in whispers, hissing. “See, One-Eye, you must know where there are death places and food set out which must not be eaten. Bring such food here, set it down. We will know. We will see that Keeper eats it, when he returns. Then, One-Eye, then—”

  Suddenly, silence.

  All heads were raised.

  A Father’s deep voice was shrill with fear. “That is smoke!”

  But another Father said, “The Race will see that no harm comes to Us.” And the others all repeated his assurance. They moved to and fro, in Their odd, circumscribed way, a few paces to each side, and around, and over each other, and back. They were waiting.

  It seemed to the One-Eye that the smoke grew thicker. And a Mother said, “While We wait, let Us listen for Keeper and for the steps of those The Race will send to rescue Us. Meanwhile, you, One-Eye, try the knots. Test the knots, see if you can set Us free.”

  “What is this talk of ‘try’ and ‘test’ and ‘see’?” a Father then demanded. “He has only to act and it is done! Have We not discussed this amongst Ourselves, always, always? Are We not agreed?”

  A second Mother said, “It is so. The One-Eye has freedom, full freedom of movement, while We have not; he can reach the knots and We can not. Come, One-Eye. Act. And while you set Us free, We will listen, and when We are free, We will not need to wait longer for Keeper and the others. Why do they not come?” she concluded, querulous and uncertain.

  And they cried to him to untie Them, set Them free, and great things would be his with Them; and, “If not,” They shrilled, “We will kill you!”

  They pushed him off and ordered him to begin. The smell of the smoke was strong.

  Presently he said, “I can do nothing. The knots are too tight.”

  “We will kill you!” they clamored. “It is not so! We are agreed it is not!” And again and again he tried, but could do nothing.

  “Listen, Mothers and Fathers,” the milk-voiced one said. “There is no time. No one comes. The Race has abandoned Us. There must be danger to them; rather than risk, they will let Us die and then they will make another choosing for new Mothers and Fathers.”

  Silence. They listened, strained, snuffed the heavy air.

  Then, screaming, terrified, the others leaped up, fell back, tumbling over each other. A Mother’s voice—soft, warm, rich, sweet—spoke. “There is one thing alone. Since the knots will not loose, they must be severed. One-Eye! Your teeth. Quickly! Now!”

  The others crouched and cringed, panting. The One-Eye sank his teeth into the living knot, and, instantly a Father screamed and lunged forward, cried stop.

  “That is pain!” he whimpered. “I have not felt pain before, I cannot bear it. Keeper will come, the others will save Us, The Race—”

  And none would listen to the Mother.

  “Mother, I am afraid,” the One-Eye said. “The smoke is thicker.”

  “Go, then, save yourself,” she said.

  “I will not leave without you.”

  “I? I am part of the whole. Go. Save yourself.”

  But still he would not, and again he crept up to her.

  They came at last to the end of the passage. They could not count the full number of the dead. The smoke was gone now. The Mother clung to him with her fore limbs. Her hind limbs dragged. She was weak, weak from the unaccustomed labor of walking, weak from the trail of thick, red blood she left behind from the wound which set her free.

  “Is this outside?” she asked.

  “I think so. Yes, it must be. See! Overhead—the goldshining! The rest I do not know,” the One-Eye answered.

  “So that is the goldshining. I have heard—Yes, and the rest, I ha
ve heard, too. Those are the houses of the slaves and there are the fields the slaves tend, and from which they make the food which they store up for Us. Come help me, for I must go slowly; and we will find a place for Us. We will mate, for We are now The Race.” Her voice was like milk. “And our numbers will not end.”

  He said, “Yes, Mother. Our numbers will not end.”

  With his single eye he scanned Outside—the Upper World of the slaves who thought themselves masters, who, with trap and terrier and ferret and poison and smoke, warred incessantly against The Race. Did they think that even this great slaughter was victory? If so, they were deceived. It had only been a skirmish.

  The slaves were slaves still; the tail-tied ones were kings.

  “Come, Mother,” he said. And, slowly and painfully, and with absolute certainty, he and his new mate set out to take possession of the world.

  The Price of a Charm; or, The Lineaments of Gratified Desire

  INTRODUCTION BY HENRY WESSELLS

  Astronomers had speculated about the existence of Pluto long before the planet was discovered in 1930: Even while it remained unseen, its influence on comets could be observed. “The Price of a Charm; or The Lineaments of Gratified Desire” is the story of one of the key events of the twentieth century, and it is all the more powerful for being extremely subtle. It is the account of a meeting between Old Steven, a maker of charms for success in the hunt or in love, and a younger man, Gabriel (or Gavrilo), who is a…fanatic. This brief, shattering tale (first published as “Price of a Charm” in 1963) is right at the core of an issue that is very much in the public eye (again) as I write this in 1996. The story will always be unsettling and timely, whatever the headlines may read.

  The paradox of Avram Davidson’s writing is that the unspoken, unwritten words matter as much as those actually on the page. In “There Beneath the Silky-Tree and Whelmed in Deeper Gulphs Than Me,” there is a wonderful description of Jack Limekiller’s first response to the peculiar economy of British Hidalgo:

  … and he had the flashing thought that somehow he might help fill those holes; he was a while in finding out that this amounted to hoping to fill the holes in a piece of lace: the holes were part of the pattern.

  This is also a description of Avram’s writing. His strategy of narration by omission is nowhere so clear as in this story (only “Naples” comes close). Avram doesn’t use the overheated rhetoric of the horror writer; his omissions have nothing in common with latter-day minimalists whose world is narrow and monotone. What Avram writes is enough: he demands of us that we make connections he himself made, so that we reach the point where we know why his one or two clues are sufficient to evoke the entire history of Europe. I am not writing an explanation of this story, so I too must omit two or three words that Avram chose to leave out; for explanations, see my comprehensive survey, “A Preliminary Annotated Checklist of the Writings of Avram Davidson” in the Bulletin of Bibliography (vol. 53, issues 1 & 2 [1996]).

  THE PRICE OF A CHARM; OR, THE LINEAMENTS OF GRATIFIED DESIRE

  THE MOUNTAIN AIR WAS clear and sweet, scented with wild herbs, and although the young man had come quite a distance, he was not at all tired. The cottage—it was really little more than a hut—was just as it had been described to him; clearly, many people in the district had had occasion to visit it.

  At one side a tiny spring poured over a lip of rock and crossed the path beneath a rough culvert. At the other side was a row of beehives. A goat and her kid grazed nearby, and a small black sow ate from a heap of acorns with a meditative air.

  A man with white hair got up from the bench and held out his hand. “A guest,” he said. “A stranger. No matter—a guest, all the same. Everyone who passes by is my guest, and the toll I charge is that I make them drink with me.”

  He laughed; his laugh was infectious, and the young man laughed too—though his sallow, sullen face was not that of one who laughed often.

  The hand he shook was hard and callused. “I am called Old Stevan,” the peasant said. “It used to be Black Stevan, but that was a long time ago. Even my mustache is white now—” he stroked its length affectionately—“except for here, in the middle. I am always smoking tobacco. Smoking and drinking, who can live without them?”

  He excused himself, and returned almost at once with bottle, two glasses, and cigarettes.

  “I do not usually—” the young visitor began, with a frown which seemed familiar to his face.

  “If you do not smoke, you do not smoke. But I allow only Moslems to refuse a drink. One drink—a mere formality.”

  They had one drink for formality, a second drink for friendship, and a third drink to show that they did not deny the Trinity.

  Stevan wiped his mustache between his index finger and thumb, thrust in a cigarette, lit it, and smiled contentedly.

  “A good thing, matches,” he said. “When I was a boy we had to use tinderboxes. How the world does change! You came for a charm?”

  The young man seemed relieved now that the preliminaries of his visit were over. “I did,” he said.

  “Your name?”

  “Gavrillo.”

  Old Stevan repeated it, nodding, blowing out smoke. “I am, of course, well-known for my charms,” he said complacently. “I refer to those I make, not those with which Providence endowed me—although there was a time… Well, well. My hair was black in those days. I can make quite a number of charms, although some of them are not in demand any longer. I don’t remember the last time I supplied one to keep a woman safe from Turks. Before you were born, I’m sure. On the other hand, charms to help barren women conceive are as much called for as ever.”

  Gavrillo said, scowling, that he was not married.

  “My charges are really quite reasonable, too. I can guarantee you perfect protection against ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and the evil spirits of the hills and forests—their cloven hoofs and blood-red nails—”

  “I am not afraid of those. I have my crucifix.” His hand went to the neck of his open shirt.

  “Very well,” Old Stevan said equitably. “I’ve nothing to say against that. I also prepare an excellent charm for success in the hunt …”

  “Ah.”

  “And an equally excellent one for success in love.”

  “Yes.”

  Old Stevan nodded benignly. “That’s it, then, is it? The love charm?”

  Gavrillo hesitated, then scowled again.

  “Which one means more to you? Or, putting it another way, at which are you more proficient? Take the charm for the other.”

  The young man threw out his hands. “I am good at neither! And it is important to me that I must excel in one of them.”

  Stevan lit another cigarette. “Why only one? Take both. The price—”

  But Gavrillo shook his head. “It’s not the price.” He looked out on the wide-spread scene, the deep and dark-green valleys with their forest of oak and beech and pine, the mountains blue with distance, the silvery river. “It’s not the price,” he repeated.

  “As far as you can see on all sides,” the old man said quietly; “in fact, farther, my reputation is known. People have come to me from across the frontier. If it is not the price, take both.” He saw Gavrillo shake his head, but continued to speak. “The hunt. A day like today. You take your gun and go off in the woods with a few friends. The road is dusty, but in the woods, in the shade, it is cool. Your friends want to go to the right, but you, you have the charm, you know that the way to turn is to the left. They may protest, but you are so confident that they follow. Presently you see something out of the corner of your eye. The others have not noticed it at all, or perhaps assume it is the branch of a dead tree. But you know better. Your eye is clear, you turn swiftly, your arm and hand are quick as never before, the bird flushes, you fire! There it is, at your feet—a fine woodcock. Eh?”

  Gavrillo nodded, eyes gleaming.

  “Or it might be a red doe, or a roebuck. A fine stag! You can hardly count all th
e points! Everyone admires you… Perhaps in the winter the peasants come to you. ‘Master, a wolf. No one is such a hunter as you are. Come, save our flocks.’ They have not even seen the beast when your shot brings it down. You wait while they fetch it. They drag the creature along, shouting your praise: ‘Only one shot, and at that distance, too!’ they cry, and kiss your hand. ‘Brave one, hero,’ they call you.

  A dreamy smile played on Gavrillo’s face, and he slowly, slowly nodded.

  Old Stevan waited a few moments; but when his visitor said no word, he went on. “Then there is love. What can compare to that? A man who does not enjoy the love of women is only half alive—if even so much. No doubt there is a young woman on whom you have looked, often, with longing, but who never returns that look. She has long black hair. How it glistens, how it gleams! Her lips are soft and red, and sometimes she wets them with her red little tongue. Inside her bodice the young breasts grow, ripe and sweet as fruit …”

  The young man’s eyes seemed glazed. He did not stop the slow nodding of his head.

  “You return, the love charm is in your pocket, against your heart, here. There is a dance, you join in, so does she. Presently you come face to face. She looks at you—as if she has never seen you before. How wide her eyes grow! Her mouth opens. Her teeth are small and white. You smile at her and instantly she smiles back, then looks away, shyly—but only for an instant—and you dance together.

  “Soon the stars come out and the moon rises. The old women are drowsing, the old men are drunk. You take her hand in yours and the two of you slip away. The moment you stop, she throws her arms around you and puts her mouth up to be kissed. The night is warm, the grass is soft. The night is dark and deep, and love is sweet.”

  Gavrillo made a sound between a sigh and a groan. Slowly he reached into his pocket, took out his purse, and began to slide its contents into his hand.

  “You have made up your mind?” the old man asked. “Which is it to be, then?” There was no answer. Something caught the old man’s eye. “This one is a foreign coin,” he said, touching it with his finger. “But never mind, I will take it: it is gold.”