The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  The Blemmye pawed at a hidden trigger, and the great iron door swung shut behind him with a hollow boom. He wheezed and coughed, and snorted loudly through his dripping nose.

  Sinan, who had breathed less deeply of the hellish fumes, was the first to recover. He spat, and wiped his streaming eyes, then gestured to Hildegart for pen and ink.

  Then Sinan sat atop a limestone boulder. He ignored her questions with a shake of his turbaned head, and fervently scribbled his notes.

  Hildegart followed the laboring Blemmye as he tugged at his bony, rattling burden. The Silent Master trembled like a dying ox as he hauled the big skidding carcass. His sturdy leather boots had been lacerated, as if chopped by picks and hatchets.

  Ignoring his wounds, the Blemmye dragged the riddled corpse of his beloved, yard by painful yard, down the slope toward the Dead Sea. The empty carapace was full of broken holes. The she-demon had been pecked to pieces from within.

  Hildegart had never seen the Blemmye hurt. But she had seen enough wounded men to know the look of mortal despair, even on a face as strange as his.

  The Blemmye collapsed in anguish at the rim of the sullen salt lake.

  Hildegart smoothed the empty sand before him with her sandaled foot. Then she wrote to him with a long brass pin from the clasp of her cloak. “Master, let us return to your Paradise. There I will tend to your wounds."

  The Blemmye plucked a small table knife from his belt and scratched rapidly in the sand. “My fate is of no more consequence / I care only for my darling's children / though born in this unhappy place/ they are scions of a great and noble people."

  "Master, let us write of this together in some much better place."

  The Blemmye brushed away her words with the palm of his hand. “I have touched my poor beloved for the last time in my life / How pitifully rare were our meetings / We sent each other word through the black gulfs and seas amid the stars / to understand one sentence was the patient work of years / her people and mine were mortal enemies / And yet she trusted me / She chose to become mine / She fled with me in exile to this distant unknown land / Now she has left me to face our dark fate alone / It was always her dear way to give her life for others / Alas my sweet correspondent has finally perished of her generosity."

  The Blemmye tugged in fitful despair at his lacerated boots.

  Resignedly, Hildegart knelt and pulled the torn boots from her Master's feet. His wounds were talon slashes, fearsome animal bites. She pulled the cotton wimple from her head and tore it into strips.

  "I promised her that I would guard her children / sheltering them as I always sheltered her / That foolish vow has broken my spirit / I will fail her in my promise, for I cannot live without her / Her goodness and her greatness of spirit / She was so wise, and knew so many things / Great marvels I could never have guessed, known, or dreamed of / What a strange soul she had, and how she loved me / What wondrous things we shared together from our different worlds / Oh, how she could write!"

  Sinan arrived. The Assassin's eyes were reddened with the fumes, but he had composed himself.

  "What have you been doing?” Hildegart demanded, as she worked to bind the Blemmye's bleeding, toeless feet.

  "Listen to this feat of verse!” Sinan declared. He lifted his parchment, cleared his throat, and began to recite. “'With my own eyes, I witnessed the corpses of the massacred! Lacerated and disjointed, with heads cracked open and throats split; spines broken, necks shattered; noses mutilated, hair colored with blood! Their tender lips were shriveled, their skulls cracked and pierced; their feet were slashed and fingers sliced away and scattered; their ribs staved in and smashed. With their life's last breath exhaled, their very ghosts were crushed, and they lay like dead stones among stones!’”

  Hildegart's bloodied fingers faltered on the knot of her rough bandage. The sun beat against her bared head. Her ears roared. Her vision faded.

  When she came to, Sinan was tenderly sponging her face with water from his canteen. “You swooned,” he told her.

  "Yes,” she said faintly, “yes, that overcame me."

  "Of course it would,” he agreed, eyes shining, “for those wondrous verses possessed me in one divine rush! As if my very pen had learned to speak the truth!"

  "Is that what you saw in Hell?” she said.

  "Oh no,” he told her, “that was what I witnessed in the siege of Jerusalem. I was never able to describe that experience before, but just now, I was very inspired.” Sinan shrugged. “Inside that ugly mine, there is not much to see. There is dark acrid smoke there, many chewed bones. The imps within, they screeched and rustled everywhere, like bats and lizards. And that infernal stench.... “Sinan looked sidelong at the Blemmye's wounded shins. “See how the little devils attacked him, as he walked through the thick of them, to fetch out their dam."

  Though the Blemmye did not understand Sinan's words, the tone of the Assassin's voice seemed to stir him. He sat up, his black eyes filmy and grievous. He took up his knife again, and carved fresh letters into the sand. “Now we will take the precious corpse of my beloved / and sink her to her last rest in this strange sea she loved so much. / This quiet lake was the kindest place to her of any in your world."

  Sinan put his verses away, and pulled at one whitened limb of the Blemmye's ruined lover. The bony armor rocked and tilted like a pecked and broken Roc's egg. The wounded Blemmye stood on his bleeding feet, lifting and shoving at the wall of bone with all his failing strength. The two of them splashed waist-deep into the evil water.

  As the skeleton sank into the shallows, there was a sudden stirring and skittering. From a bent corner of the shell, shaking itself like a wet bird, came a small and quite horrible young demon. It had claws, and a stinging tail, and a circlet of eyes like a spider. It hopped and chirped and screeched.

  Sinan wisely froze in place, like a man confronting a leopard. But the Blemmye could not keep his composure. He snorted aloud and fled splashing toward the shore.

  The small demon rushed after the Blemmye as if born to the chase. It quickly felled him to the salty shore. At once, it began to feed on him.

  Sinan armed himself with the closest weapon at hand: he tore a bony flipper from the mother's corpse. He waded ashore in a rush, and swung this bone like a mace across the heaving back of the imp. Its armor was as tough as any crab's, though, and the heavy blow only enraged it. The little demon turned on the Assassin with awful speed, and likely would have killed a fighter less experienced. Sinan, though, was wise enough to outfox the young devil. He dodged its feral lunges, striking down and cracking the vulnerable joints in its twitching, bony limbs. When the monster faltered, foaming and hissing, he closed on it with a short, curved dagger from within his robe.

  Sinan rose at last from the young beast's corpse, his robes ripped and his arm bloodied. He hid his blade away again, then dragged the dead monster to the salt shore. There he heaved it with a shudder of loathing into the still water beside its mother.

  Hildegart knelt beside the panting Blemmye. His wounds had multiplied.

  The Blemmye blinked, faint with anguish. His strength was fading visibly, yet he still had something left to write. He scraped at the sand with a trembling fingertip. “Take me to my Paradise and bind my wounds / See to it that I live / I shall reveal to you great wonders and secrets / beyond the comprehension of your prophets."

  Sinan took Hildegart by the arm.

  "I'm no longer much concerned about our horses, my dear,” he told her. He knelt and smoothed out their Master's writing. A spatter of his own blood fell on the sand beside the Blemmye's oozings.

  "That ugly monster has hurt you, my brave hero!"

  "Do you know how many times this poor old body of mine has known a wound?” Sinan's left arm had been badly scored by the creature's lashing tail. He gritted his teeth as she tied off his arm with a scarf. “What a joy that battle was, my darling. I have never killed anything that I wanted to kill so much."

  The Blemmye propped his headle
ss body on one elbow. He beckoned at them feebly. Hildegart felt a moment of sheer hatred for him, for his weakness, for his foolish yieldings to the temptations of darkness. “What it is that the Blemmye wants to write of now, these ‘great secrets’ that he promises us?"

  "It will be much the same as it was before,” Sinan said with disgust. “That mystical raving about the Sun being only a star."

  Hildegart shivered. “I always hated that!"

  "The world is very, very old, he'll insist on that nonsense, as well. Come, let us help him, my dear. We shall have to patch the Master up, for there is no one else fit to do it."

  "Thousands of years,” Hildegart quoted, unmoving where she stood. “Then, thousands of thousands of years. And thousands, of thousands, of thousands. Then thirteen and a half of those units. Those are the years since the birth of the universe."

  "How is it you can remember all that? Your skills at numeration are beyond compare!” Sinan trembled suddenly from head to foot, in an after-combat mix of rage, fear, and weariness. “My dear, please give me counsel, in your wisdom: Did his huge numbers ever make any sense to you? Any kind of sense at all?"

  "No,” she told him.

  The Assassin looked wearily at the fainting Blemmye. He lowered his voice. “Well, I can fully trust your counsel in this matter, can't I? Tell me that you are quite sure about all that."

  Hildegart felt a rush of affection for him. She recognized that look of sincere, weighty puzzlement on his face; he'd often looked like that in the days when they had played chess together, whiling away pleasant evenings as lord and concubine. It was Sinan who had taught her chess; Sinan had taught Hildegart the very existence of chess. Chess was a wonderful game, with the crippled Shah, and the swift Vizier, and all their valiant knights, stern fortresses and crushing elephants. When she began to defeat him at chess, he only laughed and praised her cleverness; he seemed to enjoy their game all the more.

  "My dear, brave Sinan, I can promise you: God Himself doesn't need such infinities, not even for His angels to dance on the heads of pins.” Hildegart felt light-headed without her wimple, and she ran her hands self-consciously across her braids. “Why does he think that numbers are some kind of reward for us? What's wrong with gold and diamonds?"

  Sinan shrugged again, favoring his wounded arm. “I think his grief has turned his mind. We must haul him away from his darling now. We must put him to bed, if we can. No man can be trusted at the brink of his lover's grave."

  Hildegart gazed with loathing at the demonic skeleton. The dense salt water still bore the she-monster up, but her porous wreck was drowning, like a boat hull riddled with holes. A dark suspicion rose within Hildegart's heart. Then a cold fear came. “Sinan, wait one moment longer. Listen to me now. What number of evil imps were bred inside that great incubus of his?"

  Sinan's eyes narrowed. “I would guess at least a hundred. I knew that by the horrid noise."

  "Do you remember the story of the Sultan's chessboard, Sinan? That story about the great sums.” This was one of Sinan's Arabic tales: the story of a foolish sultan's promise to a cheating courtier. Just one grain of wheat on the first square of the chessboard, but two grains of wheat on the second, and then four on the third, and then eight, sixteen, thirty-two. A granary-leveling inferno of numbers.

  Sinan's face hardened. “Oh yes. I do remember that story. And now I begin to understand."

  "I learned that story from you,” she said.

  "My clever darling, I well remember how we shared that tale—and I also know the size of that mine within the earth! Ha-ha! So that's why he needs to feed those devils with the flesh of my precious pack horses! When those vile creatures breed in there, then how many will there be, eh? There will be hundreds, upon hundreds, piled upon hundreds!"

  "What will they do to us?” she said.

  "What else can they do? They will spill out into our sacred homeland! Breeding in their endless numbers, they will spread as far as any bird can fly!"

  She threw her arms around him. He was a man of such quick understanding.

  Sinan spoke in a hoarse whisper. “So, darling, thanks to your woman's intuition, we have found out his wicked scheme! Our course is very clear now, is it not? Are we both agreed on what we must do?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Well, I must assassinate him."

  "What, now?"

  Sinan released her, his face resolutely murderous. “Yes, of course now! To successfully kill a great lord, one must fall on him like a thunderbolt from a clear sky. The coup de grâce always works best when least expected. So you will feign to help him to his feet. Then, without a word of warning, I will bury my steel blade between his ribs."

  Hildegart blinked and wiped grains of salty sand from her cloak. “Does the Blemmye have ribs, Sinan?"

  Sinan stroked his beard. “You're right, my dear; I hadn't quite thought that through."

  But as they conspired together, the Blemmye himself rose from the bloodstained sand. He tottered and staggered into the stinging salts of the dead lake. His darling had failed to sink entirely from sight.

  Half-swimming, their master shoved and heaved at the bony ridges and spars that broke the surface. The waters of the Dead Sea were very buoyant by nature, but the Blemmye had no head to keep above the water. He ignored their shouts and cries of warning.

  There he sank, tangled in the heavy bones of his beloved. Minutes later, his drowned corpse bobbed to the surface like a cork.

  After the death of the Silent Master, life in the Holy Land took a swift turn for the worse. First, exotic goods vanished from the markets. Then trade faltered. Ordered records went unkept. Currencies gyrated in price. Crops were ravaged and villages sacked, caravans raided and ships sunk. Men no longer traded goods, or learned from one another; they were resolved upon massacre. Defeat after wave of defeat scourged the dwindling Christian forces. Relentlessly harassed, the Crusaders lurked and starved within their stone forts, or else clung fitfully to offshore ships and islands, begging reinforcements that were loath to come.

  Sinan's Moslem raiders were the first to occupy the Blemmye's Paradise. Sinan had vaguely meant to do something useful with the place. The Assassin was a fiendish wizard whose very touch meant death, and his troops feared him greatly. But armies were low on discipline when loot was near. Soon they were breaking the plumbing, burning the libraries, and scraping at semi-precious stones with the blades of their knives.

  Hildegart's own Crusader forces had arrived late at the orgy, but they were making up for lost time. The Christians had flung themselves on the Blemmye's oasis like wolves. They were looting everything portable, and burning all the rest.

  Six guards dragged Hildegart into Sinan's great black battle tent. They threw her to the tasseled carpet.

  The pains of battlefield command had told on the alchemist. Sinan's face was lined, and he was thinner. But with Hildegart as his captive, he brightened at once. He lifted her to her feet, drew his scimitar, and gallantly sawed the hemp ropes from her wrists. “How astonishing life can be!” he said. “How did you reach me amid all this turmoil?"

  "My lord, I am entirely yours; I am your hostage. Sir Roger of Edessa offers me to you as the guarantee of the good behavior of his forces.” Hildegart sighed after this little set speech.

  Sinan seemed skeptical. “How unseemly are these times at the end of history! Your paladin Roger offers me a Christian holy woman for a hostage? A woman is supposed to be a pleasant gift between commanders! Who is this ‘Roger of Edessa'? He requires some lessons in knightly courtesy."

  Hildegart rubbed her chafed wrists. Her weary heart overflowed toward the Assassin in gushing confidence. “Sinan, I had to choose Roger of Edessa to command this expedition. Roger is young, he is bold, he despises death, and he had nothing better to do with himself but to venture forth and kill demonic monsters...."

  Sinan nodded. “Yes, I understand such men perfectly."

  "I myself forced Sir Roger to appoint me as your
hostage."

  "I still must wonder at his lack of gallantry."

  "Oh, it's all a very difficult story, very. The truth is, Roger of Edessa gave me to you as a hostage because he hates me. You see, Sir Roger dearly loves my granddaughter. This granddaughter of mine is a very foolish, empty-headed girl, who, despite her fine education, also despises me bitterly. When I saw the grip that their unchaste passion had on the two of them, I parted them at once. I kept her safe in a tower in Tyre with my message birds.... Roger is a wandering adventurer, a freelance whose family fief was lost years ago. I had a much more prosperous match in mind for this young girl. However, even bread and water could not break her of her stupid habit of loving him.... It is her hand in marriage that Roger seeks above all, and for her silly kisses he is willing to face hell itself.... Do I tire you with all this prattling, Sinan?"

  "Oh no, no, you never tire me,” Sinan said loyally. He sat with a weary groan, and absently patted a plump velvet cushion on the carpet. “Please do go on with your exotic Christian romance! Your personal troubles are always fascinating!"

  "Sinan, I know I am just a foolish woman and also a cloistered nun, but do grant me some credit. I, a mere nun, have raised an army for you. I armed all these wicked men, I fed them, I clothed them, I brought them here for you to kill those demons with.... I did the very best I could."

  "That was a very fine achievement, sweet little Hudegar."

  "I am just so tired and desperate these days. Since the dark word spread of our Silent Master's death, all my agents have fallen to quarreling. The birds no longer fly, Sinan, the birds go neglected and they perish. And when the poor birds do arrive, they bear me the most awful news: theft, embezzlement, bankruptcies, every kind of corruption.... All the crops are burned around Tyre and Acre, Saladin's fearsome raiders are everywhere in the Holy Land.... There is famine, there is pestilence.... The clouds take the shapes of serpents, and cows bring forth monsters.... I am at my wits’ end."

  Sinan clapped his hands, and demanded the customary hostage cloak and hostage hat. Hildegart donned the official garments gratefully. Then Hildegart accepted a cool lime sherbet. Her morale was improving, since her Assassin was so kindly and dependable.