Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle

by Beagle, Peter S.

  The sky was thin and cool, rising pale gold, but Lila paid no attention to it. She was ramping under the swarm of little dogs; rearing and spinning in circles, snarling blood. The dogs were terrified and bewildered, but they never swerved from their labor. The smell of love told them that they were welcome, however ungraciously she seemed to receive them. Lila shook herself, and a pair of squealing dachshunds, hobbled in a double harness, tumbled across the sidewalk to end at Farrell’s feet. They scrambled up and immediately towed themselves back into the maelstrom. Lila bit one of them almost in half, but the other dachshund went on trying to climb her hindquarters, dragging his ripped comrade with him. Farrell began to laugh.

  The black man said, “You think it’s funny?” and hit him. Farrell sat down, still laughing. The man stood over him, embarrassed, offering Farrell his handkerchief. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “But your dog killed my dog.”

  “She isn’t my dog,” Farrell said. He moved to let a man pass between them, and then saw that it was the superintendent, holding his pistol with both hands. Nobody noticed him until he fired; but Farrell pushed one of the foamy-haired girls, and she stumbled against the superintendent as the gun went off. The silver bullet broke a window in a parked car.

  The superintendent fired again while the echoes of the first shot were still clapping back and forth between the houses. A Pomeranian screamed that time, and a woman cried out, “Oh my God, he shot Borgy!” But the crowd was crumbling away, breaking into its individual components like pills on television. The watching cars had sped off at the sight of the gun, and the faces that had been peering down from windows disappeared. Except for Farrell, the few people who remained were scattered halfway down the block. The sky was brightening swiftly now.

  “For God’s sake, don’t let him!” the same woman called from the shelter of a doorway. But two men made shushing gestures at her, saying, “It’s all right, he knows how to use that thing. Go ahead, buddy.”

  The shots had at last frightened the little dogs away from Lila. She crouched among the twitching splotches of fur, with her muzzle wrinkled back and her eyes more black than green. Farrell saw a plaid rag that had been a dog jacket protruding from under her body. The superintendent stooped and squinted over the gun barrel, aiming with grotesque care, while the men cried to him to shoot. He was too far from the werewolf for her to reach him before he fired the last silver bullet, though he would surely die before she died. His lips were moving as he took aim.

  Two long steps would have brought Farrell up behind the superintendent. Later he told himself that he had been afraid of the pistol, because that was easier than remembering how he had felt when he looked at Lila. Her tongue never stopped lapping around her dark jaws; and even as she set herself to spring, she lifted a bloody paw to her mouth. Farrell thought of her padding in the bedroom, breathing on his face. The superintendent grunted and Farrell closed his eyes. Yet even then he expected to find himself doing something.

  Then he heard Mrs. Braun’s unmistakable voice. “Don’t you dare!” She was standing between Lila and the superintendent: one shoe gone, and the heel off the other one; her knit dress torn at the shoulder, and her face tired and smudgy. But she pointed a finger at the startled superintendent, and he stepped quickly back, as though she had a pistol, too.

  “Lady, that’s a wolf,” he protested nervously. “Lady, you please get, get out of the way. That’s a wolf, I go shoot her now.”

  “I want to see your license for that gun.” Mrs. Braun held out her hand. The superintendent blinked at her, muttering in despair. She said, “Do you know that you can be sent to prison for twenty years for carrying a concealed weapon in this state? Do you know what the fine is for having a gun without a license? The fine is Five. Thousand. Dollars.” The men down the street were shouting at her, but she swung around to face the creature snarling among the little dead dogs.

  “Come on, Lila,” she said. “Come on home with Bernice. I’ll make tea and we’ll talk. It’s been a long time since we’ve really talked, you know? We used to have nice long talks when you were little, but we don’t anymore.” The wolf had stopped growling, but she was crouching even lower, and her ears were still flat against her head. Mrs. Braun said, “Come on, baby. Listen, I know what—you’ll call in sick at the office and stay for a few days. You’ll get a good rest, and maybe we’ll even look around a little for a new doctor, what do you say? Schechtman hasn’t done a thing for you, I never liked him. Come on home, honey. Momma’s here, Bernice knows.” She took a step towards the silent wolf, holding out her hand.

  The superintendent gave a desperate, wordless cry and pumped forward, clumsily shoving Mrs. Braun to one side. He leveled the pistol point-blank, wailing, “My dog, my dog!” Lila was in the air when the gun went off, and her shadow sprang after her, for the sun had risen. She crumpled down across a couple of dead Pekes. Their blood dabbled her breasts and her pale throat.

  Mrs. Braun screamed like a lunch whistle. She knocked the superintendent into the street and sprawled over Lila, hiding her completely from Farrell’s sight. “Lila, Lila,” she keened to her daughter, “poor baby, you never had a chance. He killed you because you were different, the way they kill everything different.” Farrell approached her and stooped down, but she pushed him against a wall without looking up. “Lila, Lila, poor baby, poor darling, maybe it’s better, maybe you’re happy now. You never had a chance, poor Lila.”

  The dog owners were edging slowly back and the surviving dogs were running to them. The superintendent squatted on the curb with his head in his arms. A wary, muffled voice said, “For God’s sake, Bernice, would you get up off me? You don’t have to stop yelling, just get off.”

  When she stood up, the cars began to stop in the street again. It made it very difficult for the police to get through. Nobody pressed charges, because there was no one to lodge them against. The killer dog—or wolf, as some insisted—was gone; and if she had an owner, he could not be found. As for the people who had actually seen the wolf turn into a young girl when the sunlight touched her; most of them managed not to have seen it, though they never really forgot. There were a few who knew quite well what they had seen, and never forgot it either, but they never said anything. They did, however, chip in to pay the superintendent’s fine for possessing an unlicensed handgun. Farrell gave what he could.

  Lila vanished out of Farrell’s life before sunset. She did not go uptown with her mother, but packed her things and went to stay with friends in the Village. Later he heard that she was living on Christopher Street; and later still, that she had moved to Berkeley and gone back to school. He never saw her again.

  “It had to be like that,” he told Ben once. “We got to know too much about each other. See, there’s another side to knowing. She couldn’t look at me.”

  “You mean because you saw her with all those dogs? Or because she knew you’d have let that little nut shoot her?” Farrell shook his head.

  “It was that, I guess, but it was more something else, something I know. When she sprang, just as he shot at her that last time, she wasn’t leaping at him. She was going straight for her mother. She’d have got her too, if it hadn’t been sunrise.”

  Ben whistled softly. “I wonder if her old lady knows.”

  “Bernice knows everything about Lila,” Farrell said.

  Mrs. Braun called him nearly two years later to tell him that Lila was getting married. It must have cost her a good deal of money and ingenuity to find him (where Farrell was living then, the telephone line was open for four hours a day), but he knew by the spitefulness in the static that she considered it money well spent.

  “He’s at Stanford,” she crackled. “A research psychologist. They’re going to Japan for their honeymoon.”

  “That’s fine,” Farrell said. “I’m really happy for her, Bernice.” He hesitated before he asked, “Does he know about Lila? I mean, about what happens—?”

  “Does he know?�
� she cried. “He’s proud of it—he thinks it’s wonderful! It’s his field!”

  “That’s great. That’s fine. Goodbye, Bernice. I really am glad.”

  And he was glad, and a little wistful, thinking about it. The girl he was living with here had a really strange hang-up.

  WHAT TUNE THE ENCHANTRESS PLAYS

  Ah, there you are. I was beginning to wonder.

  No, no. Come in, do—it’s your lair, after all. Tidy, too, for a demon. I’d do something about those bones, myself, and whatever that is, over in the corner, that smelly wet thing. But each to his taste, I say; you probably wouldn’t think much of my notions of décor, either. Gods know, my mother doesn’t.

  Ah-ah-ah, no bolting—don’t embarrass us both on such a pleasant evening. Sit down, and let’s chat a little, you and I, like the old friends we practically are. Well, we might as well be, don’t you think, as long as it’s taken me to track you here. You’re very good, you know. Sit.

  Now.

  You’re good, as I said, but as shortsighted with it as all your kind. Whatever possessed you to come to Kalagira, when you could have been happily ravaging Coraic, or the fat, juicy villages around Chun? Didn’t you know about Kalagira?

  Forgive me—that was most rude, and foolish as well. Why expect a demon to be aware of one small southern province, tucked away beyond the Pass of Soshali, when so few humans are? Let me enlighten you, then. Kalagira is a country of majkes: witches like my grandmother, sorceresses like my mother… and the occasional enchantress, like me. There are certain differences worth note, but we will come to that. There is time.

  There is time, until moonset.

  At moonset I will sing to you, as I sang you here—oh, yes, that was my song you followed, with its whispers of blood and rapine, its bait of helpless victims, so close. At moonset I will sing another song, and you will go wherever it is that such as you go, when ended in this world.

  Meanwhile, we will talk, because it amuses me, because it passes the time, and for one other reason. I shall tell you of my first encounter with a creature like you. Perhaps it will amuse you in your turn.

  Well, it was not quite like you, really, that first demon of mine. If demon is what it truly was—it was larger, and rather more… majestic, excuse me, and definitely more powerful—but I run ahead of myself. Bide, Breya Drom, bide. The moon is still high.

  Well, then.

  Not all Kalagira women are witches or sorceresses—far from it—but there has been no male with such power born here in the entire history of the province, as far back as the old tales tell us, or the chronicles go. What is known, and known well, is that if the men of Kalagira cannot themselves work magic, still they are its carriers, if you understand me. A Kalagira maj who marries a local man will invariably find the knack—as we call it—making itself felt in all of her girl children; while one who weds Outside will see it come to an end in her own line, never to reappear. For that reason, Kalagira magic stays in Kalagira. In the oldest and most powerful families, it may have run true for five, six, seven generations, or even more. This can lead to old rivalries at times, old grudges.

  Do you have males and females, your kind? I’ve never been certain. Well out of it, if you don’t, but it’s the sort of thing I wonder about in the early mornings, when I’m trying not to wake.

  Do you have parents? Do you have children?

  No?

  Then attend, please, for these details matter. My mother’s name is Willalou. In her time she was the most powerful sorceress in Kalagira, though today she spends her time gardening and translating the later poems of Lenji. My father is Dunreath, the potter. They live together in the house he built for my mother. She was powerful enough to have brought it into being with a chant and a gesture—a single scribing in the air—but he would never allow it, and she was wise enough to leave such matters entirely to him. You may not know this, being a demon, but it is not easy, in Kalagira or anywhere else, for a proud, skilled man to be with a woman like my mother. But they loved each other, always, and they have lived well together.

  One evening, when I was perhaps five years old, my father brought home a small boy.

  He brought him home under his arm, squirming and snarling like a trapped shukri. I remember as though it were yesterday: the fire smoking, and the smell of wet wool; the rain—little more than a mist—sighing against the windows, and my mother rising from her loom, saying, “Dunreath?” And me, asking loudly—quite loudly, I fear—“What is that? Papa, what is that?”

  “It’s not a that, dear,” my father answered wearily. “It’s a he—a very dirty he—but I can’t tell you his name, because he won’t say.” He looked at my mother and raised his bushy eyebrows slightly. I loved his eyebrows.

  “His name is Lathro,” my mother said. “Lathro Baraquil.” The boy’s eyes widened, but his mouth remained almost invisible, so tightly was it shut. “He lives with his Aunt Yunieska and her son Pashak, and he needs a bath. He needs two baths.” My father put the boy down; my mother held out her hand, and he went with her, mutely still, but obediently. My mother had that effect on people.

  I heard them talking that night, and was surprised when my father asked, “How did you know he was Yunieska’s boy?” Didn’t he realize that Mother was magic, and knew everything?

  “He’s her nephew,” my mother answered. “I’ve seen him in the street now and then, filthier even than this sometimes. That woman has no business with a child, none.”

  “Cleans up well enough,” my father said. “I had no idea he’s got freckles.”

  My mother laughed softly. “He’s very brave, too. He looked at me when I put him in the tub—Dunreath, I don’t think he’s ever had a bath in his life, not an all-over one. He must have thought I was going to drown him, but he gave me that look, and then he stepped into the tub like a prince. There’s definitely somebody under all that dirt.”

  “I wasn’t planning on keeping him,” my father said quickly. “I just thought maybe you could clean him up a little, find him something to eat, and shoo him off home. I’ll clean the tub.”

  My mother did not answer for a time, and then not directly. She said only, “I’m going to speak to Yunieska the next time I see her.” The way she said speak made me giggle, but it made me shiver a little as well.

  That was how Lathro came.

  He stayed two days, that first time, hardly saying a word he didn’t have to, but behaving with a kind of silent grace and courtesy that must have been natural to him; he certainly couldn’t have learned it from his aunt and his cousin. On the third day he got into a fight with my older brother Jadrilja, and disappeared for very nearly a month, which is difficult in a small village like ours.

  But then he came back.

  I found him myself this time, standing in front of our house, balanced on one bare foot and scratching it with the toes of the other. He looked at me, looked away, and mumbled the first words he ever addressed directly to me, “I come for a wash.”

  Jadrilja was more than ready to pick up his debate with Lathro where our father had halted it, but that didn’t happen for a good day and a half; and by that time I had noticed that Lathro Baraquil’s brown eyes stood forth with a rich warmth disconcerting in that fierce little face. My own eyes are green, like my mother’s; my father’s are almost black, like those of all the men in his family. I had never seen eyes like Lathro Baraquil’s eyes. I still haven’t.

  So it began, long and long before either of us was aware that anything was beginning. It was much like inviting a wary, untrusting feral animal first into the yard, then a little way up onto the veranda; then into the house, if only by leaving the door ajar for the creature to choose as it will. First Lathro came, as he said, only for a bath, and once in a great while for my mother to trim his thatch of thick brown hair. Then he began to arrive, more and more, at dinnertime, for my mother to stuff him like a Thieves’ Day piglet. She was not a particularly good cook, no more than I—magic never provided a prope
r meal for anyone—but Lathro never complained.

  And in time he began to come for me.

  I knew it, accepted it, and gave it no further thought beyond our pleasure in being together. We wandered, raced, climbed trees, told each other stories; squabbled on many occasions, made up quickly, and often fell asleep on a hillside or under a tree, piled together as warmly and innocently as puppies. And when Lathro fought with one or another of my brothers—he simply could not keep from it—they had me to deal with as well. Utterly disloyal, but there you are.

  Was I aware that one of us was heir to power such as the other could never possibly know, merely by virtue of being born the right sex? I suppose I must have been, but I cannot recall it making the least bit of difference or discord between us. It might well have done so, as the years passed, if I had paid the heed I should have to my mother’s grimly patient attempts to instruct me in shapeshifting, in spirit-summoning, thaumaturgy, rhymes and songs of lore, and all the other arts I was condemned to master. But surely even a demon can see that I was fatally happy as I was. I had my mother for any magic I needed, my father for those moments when I was sad for no reason that I could put a name to… and for all the rest I had Lathro Baraquil.

  We must have seemed a strange pair to many, even as children. I was considered beautiful from my earliest youth, while for his part Lathro grew up plain—beautifully, beguilingly plain—and stubby with it, being no taller than I, ever. His best features, to the outside eye, would have been that tumbly brown hair that I loved to comb (useless as the effort was), and those brown eyes, kind for all the wide wildness they held.

  He grew up strong as well, much stronger than could be imagined at sight. At fifteen he was working at Jarg’s smithy, handling such tasks as holding the back of a haywagon up for as long a time as it took Jarg to replace a wheel or improvise an axle. I recall seeing him turn with his bare hands a frozen bolt that old Jarg couldn’t budge with a sledgehammer and a bucket of grease. Lathro hurt his right hand badly doing that once, and I healed it on the spot in a way my mother had taught me when I happened to be actually paying attention. I was proud of myself then.