FANG, THE GNOME
Michael G. Coney
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Contents
Title Page
Gateway Introduction
Contents
The Forest Girl
Springtime in Gnomedom
Fang, the Gnome
The Miggot of One
The Forging of Excalibur
The Memorizer
Chivalry is Born
The Disgrace of Fang
A Meeting in the Hollow Log
Siang and the Thing-He-Did
Avalona Plans
The Challenge
The Umbra approaches
Unhappy Days in Enomedom
Autumn in Mara Zion
The Travels of Nyneve and Merlin
Iseult’s Decision
Memories in the Mind of Fang
The Kikihuahuas
The Hua-hi and the Sa
The End of a Golden Age
Chivalry Accepted
The Morte
Website
Also by Michael G. Coney
Author Bio
Copyright
The Forest Girl
The forest was silent. The sun was low, slanting among the treetops. The spring air was cool. A wolf appeared on the far side of the pool.
It looked around and sneezed suddenly, doglike, shaking its head. Other wolves arrived, scrabbling up the boulders and gathering at the edge of the pool. One of them stared at the sky and gave out a howl of desolation.
Another looked straight at Nyneve. It was old and its muzzle was gray. It trotted stiff-legged around the pool and stopped beneath her tree, looking up. Its eyesight was poor, and it wasn’t sure what it had seen. Nyneve kept very still while the wolf looked up at her and fitted memories to images. Nyneve blinked, and the wolf’s eyes lit up. It jumped at the tree trunk, snarling and scratching. The others came running.
“Go away!” shouted Nyneve, clawing a piece of bark loose and throwing it. “Go home, you brutes! Go home right now, or I’ll set Morble on you!”
They didn’t understand. They snapped and leaped, and filled the glade with the sound of their hunger. Nyneve watched them in growing annoyance. This was an embarrassing situation. She hoped there were no villagers around.
“I’ve warned you!” she said. Then she whistled: a low sound that carried among the trees.
A breath of wind rustled the leaves, and the wolves quieted. Suddenly they were uncertain. They turned this way and that, looking unhappily at one another and at the forest. One of them cocked its leg against Nyneve’s oak and another whined, tail tucked between its legs. The wind blew again, cool and gentle, bringing with it the scent of something unimaginable. Somewhere deep in the brush there was a snapping of twigs. A wolf yelped nervously. The pack was facing the wind now, muzzles high.
“He’s coming,” said Nyneve.
At once they turned about and fled downwind, splashing through the fringes of the pool. For a moment Nyneve watched the bushes shake with their passing, then they were gone and the forest was quiet again. She laughed and slid to the ground, brushing the dirt from her loose white dress. She knelt at the pool and rubbed her hands together underwater, then splashed her face. While she had her skirt up high, drying her face on it, a voice spoke.
“Well now, if that isn’t a fine pair of legs.”
She dropped the hem with a squeak of alarm; flushing. A brawny man watched her, leaning against the oak and scratching himself, smiling slyly.
“Just you shut up, Ned Palomides!”
“Oh, so it’s you, Nyneve. Upon my word, you’ve grown up. Quite the little lady, you are. Still tomboy enough to climb trees, though.” He nodded at the bits of bark and lichen clinging to her dress.
“The wolves were after me.”
“Oh.” Spurious sympathy on his face, he stepped forward. “You should have called for help.” He began to brush at her dress.
She stepped back. “Leave me alone!”
“Oh, ho! Too proud for us villagers now, are you? Too much of a lady?”
“No.” She regarded him calmly. “Just a little bit older, that’s all.”
“And getting ideas above your station. Perhaps you should come back to the village, Nyneve. Now you’re living with that crafty old couple, you’ve changed. You’re not the same girl. …” Curiosity got the better of him. “What do they do, anyway?”
“Do?”
“The old folks. Do they fish? Do they farm? Do they cut wood, or scratch the ground for silver? People say not. One thing I do know: they must be hellish old. My grandmother used to speak of them, and even she used to call them the old folks.”
“They’re old,” agreed Nyneve.
“How old?”
“How would I know?”
“Yes, but it’s interesting, isn’t it?” He moved a step closer. “Suppose they’re—say—two hundred years old. How do they do it? What’s their secret? Is it something the) eat—some herb?” His hand closed on her arm.
“Well, I don’t know.” She tried to pull away. “I’m getting older. You said that yourself.”
“And so you are.” He glanced at her body appreciatively. “But it’s them we’re talking about—the old couple. You must find out about them. You must keep an eye on them, casual-like.”
The notion of keeping a casual eye on her foster-mother caused Nyneve to break out in goose pimples. “Forget the idea, Ned,” she said. “It’s their secret, and I think they want to keep it that way.”
“Mister Palomides to you,” he said absently, his gaze traveling over her glossy black hair, her dark eyes and full lips—her new Cornish beauty. “You must be the prettiest girl in all of Mara Zion,” he murmured.
“I must go.” She jerked her arm, but he held fast.
“Not just yet, my beauty. Let’s talk for a while.”
“Let me go, or …”
“Or what?”
“Or it’ll be the worse for you!”
He laughed, drawing her close.
She pursed her lips and whistled, just before his kiss cut her off. His breath smell
ed of old mackerel.
“There now,” he said after a moment, grinning down at her. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
Then he heard the gigantic crashing in the undergrowth, and looked up. His eyes widened as he stared over her shoulder, and Nyneve felt him tremble. He let her go and stepped back, still staring. “Witchcraft …” he muttered. “You little witch. You’re witches, all three of you! Baron Menheniot should have you burned at the stake!”
Then the stink wafted across the glade and the sound of breathing came loudly. Ned Palomides turned, bawling with fear, and fled, leaving Nyneve alone as Morble emerged from the bushes. For a while the young girl regarded the creature. “Easy, Morble, easy,” she said. “He’s gone, now.”
She looked into the forest where Ned Palomides could be glimpsed, leaping and plunging in desperate retreat.
“No, Ned,” she murmured. “Not witchcraft. Not sorcery or magic. You caught sight of a world you don’t understand, that’s all.” She sighed. “I wish I understood it myself. Maybe one day I will.”
Calling the monstrous creature to heel, she set off in the direction of the cottage where her foster-parents, Merlin and Avalona, lived.
She found Merlin in the garden that surrounded the ancient cottage. He’d been hacking at the carcass of some unidentifiable animal, preparing it for the pot by the light of a guttering lamp.
Nyneve eyed his unkempt, bloodstained figure in some distaste. “You ought to clean yourself up a bit,” she said.
“What!” He came shuffling toward her, wiping his hands on skinny shanks. “You come wandering in at all hours and have the nerve to call me dirty?”
“What’s that thing you’re cutting up?”
“That’s our supper, my girl.”
She gulped, staring at the thing. “Well, you can count me out. That’s the strangest-looking creature I’ve ever seen. Where did it come from?”
“Morble dropped it here,” admitted the ancient, reluctantly.
“Morble dropped it? Because he couldn’t stomach it himself, I suppose. Look at the ears on it! You and Avalona will eat anything, you know that?”
“Food is fuel for the body, that’s all.”
“That’s no reason why it shouldn’t taste good. And that thing’s got scales on it. You won’t catch me eating anything with scales. I’m going to have a word with Avalona about this.”
“No.” Merlin grasped her arm as she was making for the front door. “Don’t go in yet. She’s in a … a funny mood.”
She stared at him. He looked away, wispy hair floating around his head in the night breeze; thin-faced, bearded and ineffectual. Yet healthy. Nyneve had to admit that. Although Merlin had lived a very long time, he was wiry and his cheeks had a ruddy glow in the lamplight. But now he was seriously concerned about something. She pried his fingers from her arm and entered the cottage with caution.
At first she could not see Avalona. The tiny room was dark and the fire had burned low. The lamps were unlit. The chairs beside the big stone fireplace were empty—and then she saw the witch sitting at the table, bolt upright, with her eyes closed.
“Avalona …?”
The old woman blinked and shook her head, eyes still unfocused, as though she’d been in a trance. “No …” she murmured. “There’s only one way out, and even then the odds are not good. Otherwise, it’s the end.” Then she became aware of Nyneve and fixed an empty stare on her.
“You’re late.”
“What do you mean, the end?” Nyneve felt a thrill of dread at the words. Avalona always meant what she said. “The end of what?”
“The end of everything.”
“When? Now?” Nyneve glanced nervously over her shoulder. The moons had risen as usual, all three high in the sky. Merlin was stamping about sucking his finger, having cut himself with the cleaver. Everything looked normal enough.
“Not in your lifetime.”
“That’s a relief, anyway. Does it affect the village at all?”
“Nyneve, you are now sixteen years old. The time has come for you to consider matters other than those driven by human emotions. I adopted you for a purpose. From now on, you will be my handmaiden.”
“Your what?” Only great ladies in ballads had handmaidens. Nyneve had never thought of Avalona, always dressed in the same black robe and living in this tiny cottage, as a great lady.
“You will be my handmaiden, my servant and my representative. I will teach you something of my knowledge, something of the universe. Enough for your purposes, anyway. Great and terrible events are in the ifalong, and they have caught me unawares. I would start a child now, but my gestation period is too long and action must be taken immediately. You will serve my purpose.”
“The ifalong?” The word was unfamiliar.
Avalona regarded Nyneve silently for a while. Then she said, “You must start thinking in new terms, Nyneve. To understand the ifalong you must understand happentracks.”
“Happentracks?”
“Have you ever wondered at the way Morble can hide himself, despite his size and unusual appearance?”
“He’s certainly very good at it. And yet he’s there when you need him,” she added, thinking of Ned Palomides.
“Morble is our protector and our watchdog. He needs to be big and strong, but he mustn’t call attention to himself. So most of the time he lives on an adjacent happentrack, and only steps into our own happentrack when he’s needed. A happentrack is a slightly different frame of existence running parallel to our own. New happentracks are constantly branching off our stream of Time, each one developing into a different alternative possibility. The total of all those future happentracks is called the ifalong.”
“So the ifalong is the future.”
“No, Nyneve. It is all possible futures. And today is the first time I’ve looked into the ifalong for a hundred and twenty-six years and thirty-eight days. Foretelling the ifalong is a tedious and exhausting process, because I must evaluate an almost infinite number of branching happentracks.” She sighed, rubbing her eyes, and it seemed to Nyneve that she looked much older, and strangely vulnerable. “And in the distant ifalong, on a large number of happentracks, I saw the destruction of Starquin at the hands of humans.”
“I’m sorry, Avalona, but I don’t know what you’re talking about. Starquin?”
“Starquin is everything that matters. He is my father, and father to all the Dedos on other worlds. He travels the greataway, which is all the dimensions of time and space.”
“You mean he’s God?”
“There is no God.”
“Oh,” said Nyneve, disappointed. “I’d always hoped there might be a God. Why isn’t Starquin God?”
“Mainly because he can’t be everywhere at once. Nobody can, which is why your idea of God is nonsense. Starquin travels on psetic lines between Rocks that he set up on many worlds. Dedos guard those Rocks and help Starquin on his travels.”
“What else does he do?”
Avalona’s cold eyes dwelt on her. “Explain.”
“Well, is he kind and good, and helping people, and all that stuff? I mean, he’s got do do more than just travel.”
“He is. Accept it. You can’t understand.”
“And you said humans would kill him? Why?”
“They would not know their stupid acts would result in the death of the Five-in-One. But they will kill him, just as surely as they kill one another.”
“I’m sorry,” said Nyneve on behalf of the human race.
“There is a chance. There is just one circumstance we could set in motion during our present time, that may well multiply down the happentracks of the ifalong and preserve the entity of Starquin. It will require that we devote our lives to it, and that includes you, Nyneve.” Avalona regarded her speculatively. “You are a very beautiful girl. I expect the men of the village find you attractive.”
“Very attractive, I’d say,” observed Merlin, leering.
“You’d find Morble attractiv
e if he were female,” said the witch dispassionately. She addressed Nyneve again. “A beautiful young girl carries a lot of influence with men. She attracts attention and they listen to what she says. They are very alert to her likes and dislikes, and they try to please her. More than that, they will try to become the kind of man she wishes them to be. In short, Nyneve, a beautiful girl can twist men around her little finger.”
“Perhaps, but …”
“But what?”
“I’m not that beautiful.”
“Come here.” Avalona stood, and when Nyneve went to her she took the girl’s head in her hands and held it for some moments, while the forest outside became deathly quiet. Then she let go and sat down, and Nyneve walked slowly back to her chair.
Merlin gasped.
Nyneve looked at them calmly. Her head was held a little higher, her perfect skin glowed, and there was a confidence about her that had not been there before, a new serenity.
“Now you know you’re beautiful,” said Avalona. “That makes the difference.”
“Yes, I know,” said Nyneve, smiling.
“You will remember it for as long as you live. You will be that kind of woman, and now you have other powers, too, as you will soon discover. No other kind is suitable to be my handmaiden, and no other kind would be suitable for the work ahead of you.”
“What sort of work?”
“The creation of a new world. A world that will become so vivid in the minds of humans that it will influence their lives and color their judgments in the manner I require. A small world, but one that will endure longer than any human world. A world that will be remembered at the end of time, by creatures that are no longer human.”
Nyneve was silent for a moment. Then she said, “And I can help? Me?”
“You will be the instrument of change, Nyneve.”
“Oh.” Nyneve sought something sensible to say, but failed. “Oh,” she exclaimed again, awed.
“You will not be required to do anything beyond your new powers, and after a while those powers will seem quite natural to you. This is a suitable time to begin,” she said after a quick glance through nearby happentracks. “Bring your chair closer—and you, Merlin.”
Fang, the Gnome (Song of Earth) Page 1