by Gene Wolfe
“My shot must be wearing off. The shot was supposed to protect me. I’m Sergeant … Sergeant …”
The other man said, “Very few of us are protected by shots, Sergeant Chapman. Shots usually kill people, particularly soldiers.”
Randolph Carter looked at her shirt. The name CHAPMAN was engraved on a stiff plastic plate there, the plate held out like a little shelf by the thrust of her left breast.
“Sergeant Anne Chapman of the United States Army. We think it’s the plants, sir. All the psychoactive drugs we know about come from plants—opium, cocaine, heroin.”
“You’re the heroine,” he told her gently. “Coming here like this to get us out.”
“All of them chemicals the plants have stumbled across to protect us from insects, really. And now they’ve found something to protect the insects from us.” She paused, staring at him. “That isn’t right, is it?”
Again he asked, “Don’t you want to sit down?”
“Gases from the comet. The comet’s tail has wrapped all Earth in poisonous gases.”
The blonde murmured, “What is the meaning of this name given Satan: Beelzebub.”
A tiny voice from the ceiling answered.
“You, sir,” the black knight said, “won’t you come with me? We’ve got to get out of here.”
“You can’t get out of here,” the other man told them.
He nodded to the knight. “I’ll come with you, if you’ll love me.” He rose, pushing the sword up his coat sleeve, point first.
“Then come on.” She took him by the arm and pulled him through the door.
A hansom cab rattled past.
“What is this place?” She put both hands to her forehead. “I’m dreaming, aren’t I? This is a nightmare.” There was a fly on her shoulder, a blowfly gorged with carrion. She brushed it off; it settled again, unwilling to fly through the night and the yellow fog. “No, I’m hallucinating.”
He said, “I’d better take you to your room.” The bricks were wet and slippery underfoot. As they turned a corner, and another, he told her what she could do for him when they reached her room. A dead bitch lay in the gutter. Despite the night and the chill of autumn, the corpse was crawling with flies.
Sickly yellow gaslight escaped from under a door. She tore herself from him and pushed it open. He came after her, his arms outstretched. “Is this where you live?”
The three players still sat at their table. They had been joined by a fourth, a new Randolph Carter. As the door flew wide the fourth player turned to look, but he had no face.
She whispered, “This is Hell, isn’t it? I’m in Hell, for what I did. Because of what we did. We’re all in Hell. I always thought it was just something the Church made up, something to keep you in line, you know what I mean, sir?”
She was not talking to him, but he nodded sympathetically.
“Just a game in the pope’s head. But it’s real, it’s here, and here we are.”
“I’d better take you to your room,” he said again.
She shuddered. “In Hell you can’t pray, isn’t that right? But I can—listen! I can pray! Dear G—”
He had wanted to wait, wanted to let her finish, but the sword, Sacnoth, would not wait. It entered her throat, more eager even than he, and emerged spent and swimming in scarlet blood.
The faceless Randolph Carter rose from the table. “Your seat, young man,” he said through no mouth. “I’m merely the marker whom you have followed.”
Empires of Foliage and Flower
When the sun was still young and men fools who worshipped war, the wise ones of Urth took for themselves the names of humble plants to teach men wisdom. Sage there was, who gave his name to all the rest. And Acacia and Fennel; Basil, that was their anointed leader; Lichen and Eglantine, Orchis, and many more.
The greatest was Thyme.
Thyme’s habit it was to walk westward over the world, ever westward and ever older, whitening his beard and waiting for no one; and if ever he turned east, the days and the years dropped from him. The rest are gone, but Thyme (thus it was said) will walk until the sun grows cold.
On a certain day, when dawn cast Thyme’s shadow a league before him, he met a child in the road playing such a game as even Thyme, who had seen all games, had never seen before. For a moment Thyme halted. “Little girl,” he said, “what is it you play?” For she gathered up seeds of the sallowflowered garden pea, and ordered them in rows and circles, making them roll with her fingers; and scattered them to the winds, then gathered them again.
“Peace,” she said.
Thyme bent over her, smiling. “I see you play at pease,” he said. “Tell me what this game is.”
“These are people,” the child said. She held up her pease to show him, and Thyme nodded his agreement. “At first they’re soldiers like ours,” and she marshaled a column, with advance guard, rear guard, skirmishers, and outriders. “And then they fight, and then they can come home.”
“And will they never go to war again? Or fight with their wives?” Thyme asked.
“No,” the child said. “No, never.”
“Come with me, little girl,” Thyme told her, and took her by the hand.
All that day they tramped the dusty road together, mounting high hills and descending into bear-haunted vales where many say Thyme never comes. They crossed the wide valley of the Lagous, Thyme carrying the child on his shoulder at the ford of Didugua. Sometimes they sang, sometimes they talked, sometimes they went silently, walking hand in hand.
And as they walked on side by side, the child grew, so that she who had toddled in the beginning skipped and romped at the end. Thyme taught her to turn cartwheels, something he himself does very well.
That night they camped beside the road. He built a small fire to keep her warm, and told her tale after tale, for no one knows as many stories as Thyme. Green apples he picked for her, but they were red and ripe when they left his fingers.
“Who are you, sir?” the child asked, for now that Thyme had stopped, the ten watches of the night twittered and flitted like bats in the bushes about them, and she was a little frightened.
“You may call me Thyme,” he told her, “and I am an eremite. That means I live with the Increate, and not with men. Do you have a mother, child?”
“Yes,” she said. “And my mother will be worried about me, because I’m gone.”
“No,” Thyme said, and he shook his white head. “No, your mother will understand, because I left a prophecy with her when you were born. Do you know it? Think, because you must often have heard it.”
The child thought; and when the cricket had sung, she said, “‘Thyme will take my child from me.’ Yes, sir, Mama often used to say that.”
“And did she not say anything more?”
The child nodded. “She said, ‘And Thyme will surely bring her back.’”
“You see, she will not worry. Nor should you worry, child. The Increate is father to all. I take them from him—that is my function. And I return them again.”
The child said, “I don’t have a father, sir.”
Again Thyme shook his head. “You have the Increate and you have me. You may call me Father Thyme. Now go to sleep.”
The child slept, being still quite small. To make a small enchantment for her, Thyme moved his hands; gossamer covered her to keep her warm, and the flying seed of cottonwood and dandelion. She slept, but Thyme stayed awake all night to watch the stars.
In the morning the child sat up, rubbing the seeds from her eyes and looking around for Thyme. Thyme rose from the fields to greet her, sweetsmelling and wet with dew.
“I have to wash my face,” the child told him. “I’d like something to eat too, and a drink of water.”
Thyme nodded, for he understood that she indeed needed all those things. “There is a brook nearby,” he said. “It lies to the east, but that cannot be helped.”
He led her to it; and as they walked, his beard, which had been white as winter sn
ow, grew frosty, and at last iron gray.
As for the child, because she walked with Thyme, she became younger and younger. When they reached the brook, she was hardly older than she had been when Thyme had seen her playing Peace in the dusty road. Nevertheless, she scrubbed her face and hands, then drank from her hands, scooping up handful after handful of clear, cold water from the brook while Thyme picked berries for them both.
“Why is the water so cold, Father Thyme?” she asked him. “Did it sleep out all night too, but with nobody to cover it?”
Thyme chuckled, for he was beginning to recall the ways of men, and even something of the ways of little girls. “No,” he told her. “Trust me, my child, when I say that water you drink has been busy all night dashing down past rocks and roots. But it has run down from high mountain slopes where even Crocus has not yet set foot.”
“Is that where the men fight?” she asked.
Thyme nodded. “For a thousand years your Easterlings have warred with the Men of the West, making the high meadows of the mountainsides their battlefields. Doubtless there is blood in that water you drink, though there is too little for us to see. Do you still wish to drink it?”
The child hesitated, but at last scooped up more. “Yes,” she said, “because that’s all there is to drink.”
Thyme nodded again. “I drink pure rain, for the most part, mingled with a little dew, and there is no blood in either. You could not do that; you would become very thirsty, and die before the next rain. Drink as you must.”
Hand in hand they walked west, eating wild raspberries from Thyme’s old hat, the child hardly higher than Thyme’s legs. But soon the top of her head had reached Thyme’s waist; and when the last raspberry was eaten, she was nearly as tall as he, and they walked on arm in arm across the plain.
Thus they came to green Vert, that great city, the Boast of the East; and all who saw the two thought them a grandfather and his granddaughter, and smiled to hear Thyme ask if the road was not too weary for her, or the way too hard; for the child had grown lithe and long of limb, red-cheeked as an apple, with lips like two raspberries and eyes like the midnight sky.
Now it so happened that Patizithes, the Prince of the East, the Lord of All the Lands That Lie Beyond Lagous, the Margrave of the Magitae, and the Wildgrave of the Wood, the youngest son of the Emperor and heir to the Throne of Imperial Jade (for he mourned five brothers), saw them enter the city. Patizithes had been inspecting the Guard of the City Wall, a guard of boys and old men, and fretting at the duty, for he wished to ride to the war, feeling that he might win in a week what had not been won by his fierce father’s war-tried warriors in a millennium. But when his gaze strayed from the boots and the buttons, the well-buffed broadswords of the boys and the burnished bucklers of the old men, he saw the child (grown a young woman) who walked with Thyme.
Quickly he dismissed that feeble formation, drew off three rich rings and dropped them into his pocket, and canting his cap at an elegant angle, dashed down to greet them at the gate while they were still being scrutinized by the sentries.
“Old man,” said the senior sentry, “you must tell me who you are, and what it is you want in our city.”
“I am but a poor eremite, my son,” Thyme told him, “as you see. For myself, I want nothing from your proud city, and that is what I shall receive from it—a few broken bricks, perhaps, and a pretty fragment of malachite. But this child wishes to learn of peace, and of the war that took her father, and I have come with her, for she could not have reached this place without me.”
Precisely at this point, Prince Patizithes appeared. “My friend,” he said, smiling at the senior sentry (who was utterly astonished to be addressed so by the proud young paladin), “even you ought to be able to see that these travelers mean no harm. The old man’s too feeble to overpower anyone, and while those eyes might vanquish whole armies, such conquests are no breach of the peace.”
The senior sentry saluted. “It’s my duty, sir, to question everyone who seeks to enter by this gate.”
“And you have done so,” Prince Patizithes pointed out. “I merely remind you that it’s equally your duty to admit them when they’ve satisfied you as to their good intentions. I know them, and I vouch for them. Are you satisfied?”
The senior sentry saluted a second time. “Yes, sir! I am indeed, sir.”
“Then come, dear friends.” Prince Patizithes pointed to a little park, where a fragrant fountain played. “This quiet spot exists only to welcome you. Wouldn’t you like to bathe your feet in its cool waters? You can sit on the coping while I bring you a little food and a bottle of wine from that inn.”
While Thyme threw his long length on the soft green grass, the charming child permitted Prince Patizithes to hold her hand as she stepped across the cool stone coping and sat waving her weary feet in the fountain’s chanting waters. “How could your city have known we were coming?” she asked. “So as to have this park ready for us?”
Prince Patizithes pursed his lips, feigning to ponder. “We knew that someone worthy of such a place must come at last,” he whispered warmly. “And now we see that we were correct. How do you feel about duck? Our city’s as famous for its teal as for its hospitality.”
The child nodded and smiled, and when Patizithes had gone, stepped under the silver spray, washing the dust of many roads from her hair and face, and wetting the thin shift that reached now scarcely to her thighs. “Isn’t he nice?” she asked Thyme.
“No,” Thyme told her, sitting up. “No, my child, not he, though I may bring out some good in him before the end. He is brave because he has never been injured; generous, but he has not toiled for the food. You may trust me when I say that much more than that is required.”
“But he likes me, and I’m a big girl now.”
“Then ask yourself whether he would like you still, were you still a little one,” Thyme told her. “That is the test.”
“I still am a little girl inside,” the child said. “It’s only that going with you has changed my outside, Father Thyme.”
“As he is still a little boy within,” Thyme told her. “He has been changed as you have been changed, and in no other way. Do you see that woman with the basket of limes on her shoulder? She has borne many children; but the child in her is no larger than the child in you.”
“Is there a child in everybody?” the child asked.
“Yes,” Thyme told her. “But in some it is a dead child. And they are far worse than this young man.”
Prince Patizithes appeared as he spoke. The proud prince bore a patinated brass platter—a servile service he had never performed before—but since he had seen the servants and slaves of his father’s palace present comestibles in casseroles all his life, he lifted its lid with a fine flourish. “Roast teal,” he announced, smiling. “Well stuffed with chestnuts and oysters, or so I am assured.”
The charmed child served him an answering smile that pierced his poor heart.
“Wine too!” To cover his confusion, he brought a cobweb-cloaked bottle of Vert’s best vintage from one pocket, popping the cork with a tug of his teeth and taking two tall tumblers from the other. “Wine for you, Father …?”
“Thyme,” Thyme told him.
“Father Thyme. And wine for this fair lady. Your niece, perhaps, sir?”
“My adopted daughter, my son.” Thyme took the tumbler and tossed it down.
“Won’t you join us?” the child asked as she sipped.
The proud prince shrugged sorrowfully. “Alas, that rat-infested inn had only those two tumblers. But if I might have swallow from yours … ?”
Shyly the child gave him her glass, and pointedly he pressed his lips to its rim, where her own ruby lips had lingered only a moment before.
Thyme cleared his throat. “We have come to your city so that this child might see of what stuff war is made. You seem to be a person of consequence here. Would it be possible for you to arrange an interview with one of your generals for her?
I would be grateful, and so would she, I know.”
The deceitful prince dipped into the dressing for a savory oyster. “I could try to set up an interview with our emperor’s son for you two,” he said slowly. “It wouldn’t be easy, perhaps. But I could try.”
The child asked eagerly, “Or with the emperor himself? I want to ask him to make peace with the Men of the West.”
“Those yellowbellies?” The prince spat. “I don’t think my—our beloved ruler would really go so far as to punish you for that. But to be honest, dear maiden, I don’t believe it will be of the slightest use.”
Thyme tipped the cobweb-wrapped bottle above his tumbler. “Nor do I,” he said sorrowfully. “Except to her.”
“If it will be of use to her, I’ll arrange it,” Patizithes promised. “But first she must be dressed for court. It won’t do for her to be presented in that ragged shift, though you, as a peregrine holy man, may dress as you like.”
Thyme tasted the wondrous wine in his tumbler thoughtfully. “Yes, I suppose you’re right, my son. The child must have some new clothes.”
“And I’ll see to that too,” the prince pledged. “I know the seamstress who makes gowns for the most fashionable court ladies. I suppose it might take her a month or so to run one up, though; you could stay with me till it’s ready. Have you that much time?”
“All that we require, my son,” Thyme told him. Thyme was taking charge of the teal, of which the lovely child had claimed no more than a leg, and Prince Patizithes was utterly astonished to see him bite the bare bones as easily as the child had eaten the meat.
“That’s settled, then,” the prince said with satisfaction; and as soon as the two had made their meal, he brought them both to the seamstress, who curtsied like a countess when she saw the royal patron at her drawing-room door.
“Madame Gobar.” Patizithes pointed.
“What a wonderful figure!” The seamstress sighed, chucking the child beneath the chin. “You’ve hardly need of me, my dear, with that tiny waist and that face. Any little dressmaker could wrap you up in silk and slap on a few pearls and pack you off to court looking like a princess.”