Best of British Fantasy 2018

by Jared Shurin

  Gyr strode into the room. He screwed up his face in derision. Very tall and assured, he paced right up to the side of the bed and sneered down at Martyn and me.

  “What are you doing here?” Martyn snapped.

  He tilted his head on one side. “Cousins in bed together?”

  “He’s wounded. I embraced him,” she said, assertively. “No one else has bothered!”

  “Not so much heartening him as foreplay! You were kissing, like the lovers you are.”

  “Were you spying?” she demanded.

  “For hours!”

  “Why?” I snarled.

  Martyn was glaring at him. “Were you planning to cut his throat as he slept, like you killed his poor horses?”

  Gyr didn’t deign to reply; he did not so much as look at her. He said, “Saker, mother is disgusted with you. Peregrine is revolted with you.”

  “I fight. All you do is drive round and round in your little cart.”

  He laughed, and spun the handle of his whip, so its thin end lashed the air above his shoulder. “At least I can drive, without smashing myself to bits! Everyone’s laughing at you, Saker – it’s such a shame you’re missing it. Everyone thinks it’s hilarious that a great immortal can’t drive. You’re not used to losing, are you? It must have been a shock! From the top of the world – to the dirt of the track! Lightning tumbles to earth, ha ha ha!”

  “Get out!” I said.

  “Make me! You’ve only been on your feet for a few months, now here you are, abed again! Are you injuring yourself on purpose, to be with her? Will the Emperor have patience to wait, now his Archer’s always malingering? He has a problem, doesn’t he? All his immortals are good at only one thing each, and they’re crap at everything else! If you practised as much with the bow as you do with your dick, you wouldn’t have got our little brothers killed at Bitterdale.”

  “How dare you!”

  “You were lying among the dead. They went back for you. Mother blames you, you know. Lanner and Amur carried you from the field, returned to the battle, and the last Insects killed them. Everyone remarks upon it. And upon your absence, too: how you spend your time fucking like a rabbit –” he jerked his thumb at Martyn “– with that slut.”

  He tapped the butt of his whip on my plaster cast, then trailed it up my body – the skin of my stomach – prodded me in the middle of my chest – lifted the whip butt up, to under my jaw – and Martyn punched him squarely in the balls.

  Gyr dropped to the floor, clutching his groin. “Argh!”

  “Fuck you!” said Martyn.

  “...Bitch!”

  “Worm!”

  He gasped, couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t say anything else. The skin of his face went mottled red and sickly yellow, shining with sweat. Damn him! He writhed there. He was just a pathetic baby. Full of mortal concerns – driven by them – and they no longer meant anything to me. For the first time, I realised that the rivalry of princes is the squabbling of babes – and I became truly immortal. The centuries stretched out ahead of me; I was walking towards them, gaining in stature and strength. I could see clearly now, that the threads of their petty cares are nothing but the tangle of a repulsive game.

  Disgust knotted my stomach. It forced me to stand, off the bed, not heeding Martyn’s cry. I didn’t even notice the flare of pain. I grabbed Gyr’s chest. Glorying in my strength I seized two handfuls of his rich, white tunic, and dragged him across the floor. He braced his legs and resisted. I spanned my biceps like a bow, and with ease I picked him up bodily. I carried him between the gusting drapes to the balcony, and hurled him off the parapet.

  He fell the height of the terrace to the bushes below. Disappeared into them, and all I could see were his two legs sticking out, kicking.

  “Also-ran!” I called. “You make me sick!”

  Martyn joined me, laughing, and I laughed too. She leant her head on my shoulder, her arm close around my waist. I couldn’t accept the possibility I was going to leave her behind. I couldn’t stand to grow away from her, in time and place. I kept my weight from my broken leg and, hugging together, we watched Gyr floundering in the bush of Donaise thorn.

  “Martyn, please come marry me,” I said, softly. “We’ll be together, forever.”

  “I love you,” she said. “So I’ll try.”

  Now I lean on the self-same balcony, and look out over the grounds of my palace, one and a half thousand years later, and I am alone.

  As I surface from the memory of my lover and my brother, that bright morning in the summer of 625, the Insect-ravaged landscape before me disappears. The vista of bare soil and trees stripped to naked trunks, standing like thick, white staves, becomes a beautiful panorama of lush, green lawns, and well- tended woods of walnut and beech. Fallow deer graze the shadows of their margins, and Micawater lake glistens, lying calmly like a cast of jewels.

  My palace grounds, I love so much, overlay my memory, fifteen hundred years old but just as real, of the churned swamp and river of Martyn’s day, the corpses scattered on the bank, their armour dulled with mud. Antennae and Insect legs loop out from the trodden, puddled clay and silt, and the sky above resounds with the screams of the dying.

  I can flick back and forth between my vivid memory of that wasteland, and the flourishing gardens of today. And, because I still live, the sun-drenched hippodrome, the battlefield, the crunch of dewy sand under the chariots’ wheels, are somehow still alive, as well.

  In my mind, vivid, all-encompassing, as if they’re happening in this instant. I live in my memories... but the bushes below the balcony have gone, and Gyr’s legs have gone, too. Roses are planted where that thorn bush once grew. The horizon, where I stood on the brink of Bitterdale against the Insects, is no longer a bleak curve of empty earth against the sky, but wheatfields with farms, a statue on a column to commemorate my younger brothers, who lie there forever as part of the earth.

  And now, at the distance of time, I realise my mistake. Marriage between cousins is not the immovable object Martyn thought it was. Things that seem impossible, totally insurmountable, become unimportant, with time. We set the rules. If we brave the initial outcry, the world will soon come to accept us. But she, for all her daring, feared truly rebelling. So she over-complicated the question, when in reality it was a simple choice. She preferred to be left behind. She was trapped, by convention, and couldn’t escape... acquiesced to die rather than to marry me. Her fear of what other people may think... so influential, that it made her care more about convention than she cared for me. A few days after the race she asked mother for permission to marry me. Queen Teale forbade her, and she submitted, and that became her excuse to conform.

  And time passed. I was fighting at the Front, and one day a letter arrived that she had married the Steward of Donaise.

  Gyr became king, and I was no longer able to visit the palace, while Martyn raised a family. Her children grew up and had children of their own; she aged, and died, and now she lies in the family tomb, beside my parents, beside hers. Perhaps she was not the person I thought she was, nor the person I thought I wanted. But I’ll never stop searching for her, forever, and Rayne still calls me a fool.

  The palace is mine now, and it stands empty. I’m sure it seems cold and desolate to you, but for me it echoes and throngs with tangs of memories, sudden shouts in attic shafts of bright sunlight, snatches of music in the corridors around the hall. Reverberations of laughter, from a thousand years ago.

  I think I hear the footsteps of her children as they run in the hall. Gyr strides through that door with a sneer on his face. My memories are recorded in the fabric of the stone and the grain of the polished wood; I knew it well when I was young. Down there on the terrace, that corner of the fountain always seems more significant than the others, because when my leg was healing I paused there on my crutches to rest, and Martyn kissed me in full view.

  Don’t feel trapped in an impossible situation, like she did. Don’t let it be a prison around you. Yes, the
walls seem unbreakable, but you built them. Take a step back. Breathe out. Realise it is simple. The solution has been there all the time.

  Relinquish your set beliefs, allow them to fall away, and the walls will fall, too. Step forward. See! The prison has gone! You can walk out of it. You have escaped. Do what you will.

  And now the clock is chiming six p.m., the sky is louring grey, and quietly, down in the Great Hall, dinner is being served. Jant and Simoon have come to visit, so I have guests, and I won’t eat alone as I normally do.

  The wind skittered the stiff first leaves of autumn across the terrace... and they sounded like my chariot wheels, crunching the sand of the Sphendone. They blew through its spokes, and I shuddered. I clasped my coat close about me, pushed through the thick drapes of the balcony, and went down to dinner.

  Counting the Pennies

  Rhys Hughes

  “Count the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves,” is what my grandma always told me when I was quite small.

  I have never forgotten that advice, though I never acted on it until recently. I had come home from the office in a dejected mood. My boss had fired me for some little mistake I’d made. So I was without a job.

  I threw the envelope containing my final week’s wages down on the table, but my aim was poor and it slid off and burst on the floor. It had been overstuffed with notes but I knew they wouldn’t last long. The cost of living had become very expensive in the past few years. I sighed and sat down.

  The chair scraped on the bare floorboards and I knew I wouldn’t be able to afford that luxury carpet I had been saving for.

  My coat felt heavy and I wondered why, then I remembered.

  The pockets were full of small change.

  I dipped my hands like the grabs of mechanical diggers into my pockets and drew out fistfuls of pennies. I deposited them on the tabletop and stared at them. Should I start counting them? I guess I ought to.

  I would have to live a frugal life until I found a new job.

  Waste not, want not, so they say.

  I began counting the pennies. One, two, three, four...

  You know how it is done.

  And I found myself wondering if the pounds would really look after themselves if I continued counting these pennies, and thinking this thought made me lose count and I had to start again, because counting pennies is such a boring thing to do that it’s easy to become distracted by anything at all.

  I counted and my mind wandered again. I had to start a third time. My mind kept wandering. A fourth, fifth, sixth time...

  You know how it happens.

  I had probably counted more pennies than the total number of pennies on the table top, but some I had counted more than once and others not at all, so the total sum would be wrong. I had to do it properly. I took a deep breath and concentrated on the task before me. I was determined.

  I counted them with a frown, with tightly-pressed lips.

  But when I was halfway done I noticed something peculiar out of the corner of my eye. The notes on the floor were rustling. There was no draught inside the house, the windows were tightly shut. Yet they were moving and emerging from the burst envelope, undulating like freshwater eels.

  I stopped counting and they went quiet. I started again.

  They began moving again.

  It was most strange!

  I was curious about what might happen if I kept counting, so that’s what I did, and the notes, mainly twenty pound and ten pound notes with a few fivers mixed in, now began to wriggle more skilfully, with confidence and purpose. It was as if they were learning how to ambulate across my floor.

  I watched them furtively as they left the room through the open door. My instinct was to forget about the pennies and run after them. I was in absolutely no position to lose that much cash, but I also knew that they couldn’t escape the house. So I relaxed somewhat and I kept counting and the experiment proceeded, because that’s what it had become, a clever scientific experiment.

  Hadn’t it? Sure it had.

  Then I cursed, because I had lost my count again and had to start all over from the beginning. One, two, three, four...

  As I counted, I was aware that some of the notes had returned to the room but they were folded in an unusual way. They were twisted around one end and it seemed they were clutching objects that at first I was unable to discern properly. But I soon had a chance to see for myself what they were.

  The table I was sitting at was quite a low one, but there were suitcases piled around it in such a way that they formed steps to the top. The reason for this is that I live alone and I’m an untidy and chaotic person. I often put things not where they are supposed to go. The notes began to climb the steps.

  I watched them but didn’t stop counting because it was my counting that powered them. I was counting the pennies and the pounds were looking after themselves, just as my grandma had insisted they would.

  Exactly how they were looking after themselves wasn’t known.

  Not yet, at any rate. Be patient.

  That’s what I told myself with a part of my mind while another part kept counting the pennies. I watched the notes unfold themselves and then they placed down on the table a few nuts and bolts and screws and items like that. They had clearly been into the storeroom at the back of the kitchen.

  That’s where I kept the bits of hardware I’d accumulated over the years. Half-dead batteries, copper wire, nails, broken corkscrews, pieces of metal that have no purpose I can recall, cogs and levers from old clocks, the usual junk that a man is supposed to possess for those occasions when something needs to be fixed. As I counted and kept watching, the other notes trooped in.

  They climbed onto the table too and the first set of notes went off again to fetch a few more odds and ends. They were very busy and watching them was like watching ants, flattened valuable ants without legs. Then I realised that they were constructing something on the table in front of me.

  Before long the shape of the notes changed. It seemed they had learned the art of origami all by themselves and now they were folded into little animals that ran, crept, lurched and hopped across the carpet.

  As a result, the depositing of raw materials on the tabletop went faster and more smoothly and the construction of the machine also accelerated. I kept counting the pennies because otherwise all this activity would cease and I was eager to find out what the finished machine would be like.

  But counting was a monotonous task or rather it was hypnotic, and I soon fell into a trance and this trance turned into a doze, and I nodded off, still mumbling numbers in my sleep, “One, two, three, four...”

  Something cold touched my forehead and startled me awake.

  It was one of the pennies.

  My head had fallen forward and come to rest on the table top and the penny was now stuck in the middle of my brow like a third eye. I brushed it off impatiently, blinked, struggled to focus on my surroundings.

  The machine was ready.

  I saw at once what it was and what it was doing.

  An automatic counting device!

  It was counting the pennies. Counting them much faster and more adroitly than I had been able to do. I looked around but the notes had vanished. I got up and left the room with a sinking feeling in my guts.

  The front door was open.

  My money had escaped from the house.

  “Oh Grandma!” I wailed. “Why did you ever put that idea about counting pennies into my mind?” Because it was clear that counting pennies is how pounds obtain the energy to move and be sentient.

  And now the automatic counting machine was providing them with the necessary life force much more effectively than I had done with my manual counting. In fact it had saturated the notes with so much extra energy they had been able to unlock and open the front door without help.

  What else were they capable of, I wondered?

  Perhaps I ought to destroy the machine. But it occurred to me that if I did that my
money would stop dead in its tracks wherever it happened to be. Then it would surely be picked up by some random passer-by and pocketed. If I left the machine on, there was a chance the notes would return to me.

  It whirred and hummed and counted the scattered pennies.

  And I went out for a walk.

  Actually I had to go to the bank and inform them that I had lost my job and that I wanted to withdraw all my savings. It seemed to me that I could deposit my money in another bank with higher interest rates. I had to take every measure, however small, to get the maximum benefit from my remaining funds. A thrifty life in the near future was a given. I headed to the town centre.

  The receptionist in the bank gave me a puzzled look.

  “But you simply don’t have any savings here,” she told me, as she checked on her computer, “so I can’t give you anything.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “Your account stands at precisely zero.”

  “But I haven’t made any withdrawals for weeks!”

  She shook her head sadly. “The notes in your account just got up and walked out of the bank this morning. When I tried to stop them they folded themselves into origami cheetahs.”

  “The fastest land animal in the world!” I cried.

  I had no choice but to leave the bank empty handed, my confidence deflated and my pockets collapsed flat against my trousers. Cheetahs, yes, and cheaters too! I went for a melancholy stroll around the park. I kept an eye open for the notes because they might have returned to the wild.

  They might be hiding among the leaves, yes indeed.

  But I saw only squirrels.

  And birds. Neither of which I can spend.

  After an hour or so, I went back home. I left the automatic counting machine on. It was my only link to my missing money. I realised that the faster the machine counts, the more energy the notes will have, so I took away all the coins but one.

  It is very easy to count just one coin. That’s a task that can be done extremely quickly. The counting machine doesn’t need to stare too hard at the coins with its prehensile eye on a stalk, nor does it need to uncurl more than one finger from its counting hand.