Modern classics of fanta.., p.71
Modern Classics of Fantasy, page 71
“It is not to be,” she said. Her voice was a harp, playing through the forest. “It is never to be. He is yours now, no longer mine. Take him. Be kind to him. He will know his loss all his days, all his mortal days. And never know it.”
And then she relinquished her light, as a coal dies. She vanished.
I was lying on the ground before the ruined hut, holding the child close to me, trying to comfort him as he cried, and my tears fell with his. The place was empty and hollow as if its very heart had bled away.
The soldier had run down to me, and was babbling. She had tried to immolate the baby, he had seen it, Cams had woken and seen it also. And, too, my valor in saving the boy from horrible death.
* * * *
As one can set oneself to remember most things, so one can study to forget. Our sleeping dreams we dismiss on waking. Or, soon after.
They call her now, the Greek Woman. Or the Semite Witch. There has begun, in recent years, to be a story she was some man’s wife, and in the end went back to him. It is generally thought she practiced against the child and the soldiers of her guard killed her.
Draco, when I returned half-dead of the fever I had caught from the contagion of the ruinous hut—where the village crone had died, it turned out, a week before—hesitated for my recovery, and then asked very little. A dazzle seemed to have lifted from his sight. He was afraid at what he might have said and done under the influence of sorceries and drugs. “Is it a fact, what the men say? She put the child into a fire?” “Yes,” I said. He had looked at me, gnawing his lips. He knew of Eastern rites, he had heard out the two men. And, long, long ago, he had relied only on me. He appeared never to grieve, only to be angry. He even sent men in search for her: A bitch who would burn her own child—let her be caught and suffer the fate instead.
It occurs to me now that, contrary to what they tell us, one does not age imperceptibly, finding one evening, with cold dismay, the strength has gone from one’s arm, the luster from one’s heart. No, it comes at an hour, and is seen, like the laying down of a sword.
When I woke from the fever, and saw his look, all imploring on me, the look of a man who has gravely wronged you, not meaning to, who says: But I was blind—that was the hour, the evening, the moment when life’s sword of youth was removed from my hand, and with no protest I let it go.
Thereafter the months moved away from us, the seasons, and next the years.
Draco continued to look about him, as if seeking the evil Eye that might still hang there, in the atmosphere. Sometimes he was partly uneasy, saying he too had seen her dog, the black jackal. But it had vanished at the time she did, though for decades the woman Eunike claimed to meet it in the corridor of the women’s quarters.
He clung to me, then, and ever since he has stayed my friend; I do not say, my suppliant. It is in any event the crusty friendship now of the middle years, where once it was the flaming blazoned friendship of childhood, the envious love of young men.
We share a secret, he and I, that neither has ever confided to the other. He remains uncomfortable with the boy. Now the princedom is larger, its borders fought out wider, and fortressed in, he sends him often away to the fostering of soldiers. It is I, without any rights, none, who love her child.
He is all Draco, to look at, but for the hair and brows. We have a dark-haired strain ourselves. Yet there is a sheen to him. They remark on it. What can it be? A brand of the gods—(They make no reference, since she has fallen from their favor, to his mother.) A light from within, a gloss, of gold. Leaving off his given name, they will call him for that effulgence more often, Ardorius. Already I have caught the murmur that he can draw iron through stone, yes, yes, they have seen him do it, though I have not. (From Draco they conceal such murmurings, as once from me.) He, too, has a look of something hidden, some deep and silent pain, as if he knows, as youth never does, that men die, and love, that too.
To me, he is always courteous, and fair. I can ask nothing else. I am, to him, an adjunct of his life. I should perhaps be glad that it should stay so.
In the deep nights, when summer heat or winter snow fill up the forest, I recollect a dream, and think how I robbed him, the child of gold. I wonder how much, how much it will matter, in the end.
* * * *
BRUCE STERLING
Flowers of Edo
One of the most powerful and innovative new talents to come along in recent years, Bruce Sterling sold his first story in 1976, and has since sold stories to Universe, Omni, Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lone Star Universe, and elsewhere. Sterling is often thought of as purely a writer of “hard science fiction,” and made most of his reputation as one of the leaders of the Cyberpunk movement—but, in fact, he writes a good deal of fantasy as well, including such distinctive and quirky pieces as “Telliamed,” “Dinner at Audoghast,” “The Sword of Damocles,” and “The Little Magic Shop.” Sterling’s fantasy shares with his science fiction a keen eye for the details of social behavior, a dangerously dry and deadpan sense of humor, a fondness for the grotesque underbelly of life, a wry appreciation of weird juxtapositions (the more outrageous and incongruous the better), and a love of obscure and nearly forgotten historical milieu (all of which have caused him to be listed occasionally as an “Outlaw Fantasist,” along with his colleagues Howard Waldrop and Neal Barrett, Jr.). Here, for instance, he takes us to nineteenth-century Japan in the days just after its first contact with Europeans—a milieu as strange and mysterious as any alien planet, in Sterling’s gifted hands—for a lively and fascinating tale of an ex-samurai who finds he must do battle, quite literally, with the demons of Progress.
As a science fiction writer, Bruce Sterling first attracted serious attention in the eighties with a series of stories set in his exotic “Shaper/Mechanist” future (a complex and disturbing future where warring political factions struggle to control the shape of human destiny), and by the end of the decade had established himself, with novels such as the complex and Stapeldonian Schismatrix and the well-received Islands in the Net (as well as with his editing of the influential anthology Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology and the infamous critical magazine Cheap Truth) as perhaps the prime driving force behind the revolutionary Cyberpunk movement in science fiction (rivaled for that title only by his friend and collaborator, William Gibson), and also as one of the best new hard science fiction writers to enter the field in some time. His other books include the novels The Artificial Kid and Involution Ocean, a novel in collaboration with William Gibson, The Difference Engine, and the landmark collections Crystal Express and Globalhead. His most recent books are two new novels, Heavy Weather and Holy Fire, and a critically acclaimed nonfiction study of First Amendment issues in the world of computer networking, The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier. He lives with his family in Austin, Texas.
* * * *
Autumn. A full moon floated over old Edo, behind the thinnest haze of high cloud. It shone like a geisha’s night-lamp through an old mosquito net. The sky was antique browned silk.
Two sweating runners hauled an iron-wheeled rickshaw south, toward the Ginza. This was Kabukiza District, its streets bordered by low tile-roofed wooden shops. These were modest places: coopers, tobacconists, cheap fabric shops where the acrid reek of dye wafted through reed blinds and paper windows. Behind the stores lurked a maze of alleys, crammed with townsmen’s wooden hovels, the walls festooned with morning glories, the tinder-dry thatched roofs alive with fleas.
It was late. Kabukiza was not a geisha district, and honest workmen were asleep. The muddy streets were unlit, except for moonlight and the rare upstairs lamp. The runners carried their own lantern, which swayed precariously from the rickshaw’s drawing-pole. They trotted rapidly, dodging the worst of the potholes and puddles. But with every lurching dip, the rickshaw’s strings of brass bells jumped and rang.
Suddenly the iron wheels grated on smooth red pavement. They had reached the New Ginza. Here, the air held the fresh alien smell of mortar and brick.
The amazing New Ginza had buried its old predecessor. For the Flowers of Edo had killed the Old Ginza. To date, this huge disaster had been the worst, and most exciting, fire of the Meiji Era. Edo had always been proud of its fires, and the Old Ginza’s fire had been a real marvel. It had raged for three days and carried right down to the river.
Once they had mourned the dead, the Edokko were ready to rebuild. They were always ready. Fires, even earthquakes, were nothing new to them. It was a rare building in Low City that escaped the Flowers of Edo for as long as twenty years.
But this was Imperial Tokyo now, and not the Shogun’s old Edo anymore. The Governor had come down from High City in his horse-drawn coach and looked over the smoldering ruins of Ginza. Low City townsmen still talked about it—how the Governor had folded his arms—like this—with his wrists sticking out of his Western frock coat. And how he had frowned a mighty frown. The Edo townsmen were getting used to those unsettling frowns by now. Hard, no-nonsense, modern frowns, with the brows drawn low over cold eyes that glittered with Civilization and Enlightenment.
So the Governor, with a mighty wave of his modern frock-coated arm, sent for his foreign architects. And the Englishmen had besieged the district with their charts and clanking engines and tubs full of brick and mortar. The very heavens had rained bricks upon the black and flattened ruins. Great red hills of brick sprang up—were they houses, people wondered, were they buildings at all? Stories spread about the foreigners and their peculiar homes. The long noses, of course—necessary to suck air through the stifling brick walls. The pale skin—because bricks, it was said, drained the life and color out of a man …
The rickshaw drew up short with a final brass jingle. The older rickshawman spoke, panting, “Far enough, gov?”
“Yeah, this’ll do,” said one passenger, piling out. His name was Encho Sanyutei. He was the son and successor of a famous vaudeville comedian and, at thirty-five, was now a well-known performer in his own right. He had been telling his companion about the Ginza Bricktown, and his folded arms and jutting underlip had cruelly mimicked Tokyo’s Governor.
Encho, who had been drinking, generously handed the older man a pocketful of jingling copper sen. “Here, pal,” he said. “Do something about that cough, will ya?” The runners bowed, not bothering to overdo it. They trotted off toward the nearby Ginza crowd, hunting another fare.
Parts of Tokyo never slept. The Yoshiwara District, the famous Nightless City of geishas and rakes, was one of them. The travelers had just come from Asakusa District, another sleepless place: a brawling, vibrant playground of bars, Kabuki theaters, and vaudeville joints.
The Ginza Bricktown never slept either. But the air here was different. It lacked that earthy Low City workingman’s glow of sex and entertainment. Something else, something new and strange and powerful, drew the Edokko into the Ginza’s iron-hard streets.
Gaslights. They stood hissing on their black foreign pillars, blasting a pitiless moon-drowning glare over the crowd. There were eighty-five of the appalling wonders, stretching arrow-straight across the Ginza, from Shiba all the way to Kyobashi.
The Edokko crowd beneath the lights was curiously silent. Drugged with pitiless enlightenment, they meandered down the hard, gritty street in high wooden clogs, or low leather shoes. Some wore hakama skirts and jinbibaori coats, others modern pipe-legged trousers, with top hats and bowlers.
The comedian Encho and his big companion staggered drunkenly toward the lights, their polished leather shoes squeaking merrily. To the Tokyo modernist, squeaking was half the fun of these foreign-style shoes. Both men wore inserts of “singing leather” to heighten the effect.
“I don’t like their attitudes,” growled Encho’s companion. His name was Onogawa, and until the Emperor’s Restoration, he had been a samurai. But Imperial decree had abolished the wearing of swords, and Onogawa now had a post in a trading company. He frowned, and dabbed at his nose, which had recently been bloodied and was now clotting. “It’s all too free-and-easy with these modern rickshaws. Did you see those two runners? They looked into our faces, just as bold as tomcats.”
“Relax, will you?” said Encho. “They were just a couple of street runners. Who cares what they think? The way you act, you’d think they were Shogun’s Overseers.” Encho laughed freely and dusted off his hands with a quick, theatrical gesture. Those grim, spying Overseers, with their merciless canons of Confucian law, were just a bad dream now. Like the Shogun, they were out of business.
“But your face is known all over town,” Onogawa complained.
“What if they gossip about us? Everyone will know what happened back there. It’s the least I could do for a devoted fan,” Encho said airily.
Onogawa had sobered up a bit since his street fight in Asakusa. A scuffle had broken out in the crowd after Encho’s performance—a scuffle centered on Onogawa, who had old acquaintances he would have preferred not to meet. But Encho, appearing suddenly in the crowd, had distracted Onogawa’s persecutors and gotten Onogawa away.
It was not a happy situation for Onogawa, who put much stock in his own dignity, and tended to brood. He had been born in Satsuma, a province of radical samurai with stern unbending standards. But ten years in the capital had changed Onogawa, and given him an Edokko’s notorious love for spectacle. Somewhat shamefully, Onogawa had become completely addicted to Encho’s sidesplitting skits and impersonations.
In fact, Onogawa had been slumming in Asakusa vaudeville joints at least twice each week, for months. He had a wife and small son in a modest place in Nihombashi, a rather straitlaced High City district full of earnest young bankers and civil servants on their way up in life. Thanks to old friends from his radical days, Onogawa was an officer in a prosperous trading company. He would have preferred to be in the army, of course, but the army was quite small these days, and appointments were hard to get.
This was a major disappointment in Onogawa’s life, and it had driven him to behave strangely. Onogawa’s long-suffering in-laws had always warned him that his slumming would come to no good. But tonight’s event wasn’t even a geisha scandal, the kind men winked at or even admired. Instead, he had been in a squalid punch-up with low-class commoners.
And he had been rescued by a famous commoner, which was worse. Onogawa couldn’t bring himself to compound his loss of face with gratitude. He glared at Encho from under the brim of his bowler hat. “So where’s this fellow with the foreign booze you promised?”
“Patience,” Encho said absently. “My friend’s got a little place here in Bricktown. Its private, away from the street.” They wandered down the Ginza, Encho pulling his silk top-hat low over his eyes, so he wouldn’t be recognized.
He slowed as they passed a group of four young women, who were gathered before the modern glass window of a Ginza fabric shop. The store was closed, but the women were admiring the tailor’s dummies. Like the dummies, the women were dressed with daring modernity, sporting small Western parasols, cutaway riding-coats in brilliant purple, and sweeping foreign skirts over large, jutting bustles. “How about that, eh?” said Encho as they drew nearer. “Those foreigners sure like a rump on a woman, don’t they?”
“Women will wear anything,” Onogawa said, struggling to loosen one pinched foot inside its squeaking shoe. “Plain kimono and obi are far superior.”
“Easier to get into, anyway,” Encho mused. He stopped suddenly by the prettiest of the women, a girl who had let her natural eyebrows grow out, and whose teeth, unstained with old-fashioned tooth-blacking, gleamed like ivory in the gaslight.
“Madame, forgive my boldness,” Encho said. “But I think I saw a small kitten run under your skirt.”
“I beg your pardon?” the girl said in a flat Low City accent.
Encho pursed his lips. Plaintive mewing came from the pavement. The girl looked down, startled, and raised her skirt quickly almost to the knee. “Let me help,” said Encho, bending down for a better look. “I see the kitten! Its climbing up inside the skirt!” He turned. “You’d better help me, older brother! Have a look up in there.”
Onogawa, abashed, hesitated. More mewing came. Encho stuck his entire head under the woman’s skirt. “There it goes! It wants to hide in her false rump!” The kitten squealed wildly. “I’ve got it!” the comedian cried. He pulled out his doubled hands, holding them before him. “There’s the rascal now, on the wall!” In the harsh gaslight, Encho’s knotted hands cast the shadowed figure of a kitten’s head against the brick.
Onogawa burst into convulsive laughter. He doubled over against the wall, struggling for breath. The women stood shocked for a moment. Then they all ran away, giggling hysterically. Except for the victim of Encho’s joke, who burst into tears as she ran.
“Wah,” Encho said alertly. “Her husband.” He ducked his head, then jammed the side of his hand against his lips and blew. The street rang with a sudden trumpet blast. It sounded so exactly like the trumpet of a Tokyo omnibus that Onogawa himself was taken in for a moment. He glanced wildly up and down the Ginza prospect, expecting to see the omnibus driver, horn to his lips, reining up his team of horses.
