Modern classics of fanta.., p.91
Modern Classics of Fantasy, page 91
Maybe I was wrong to kill the dragon.
Maybe he was all that kept them from oblivion.
* * * *
When we had all shared Cakaravartin’s vision of Great Asura and of the giants at labor, their faces stolid and accepting of both their guilt and their punishment, and spoken with Boramohanagarahant, their king, it was almost dawn. Cakaravartin passed around the pipe one more time. “I see that you are determined to come with us,” he said to me, “and that is your decision to make. But first you should know the consequences.”
Ratanavivicta’s mask tilted in a way that I would later learn indicated displeasure. But Cakaravartin drew in deeply and passed the pipe around again. I was trembling when it came to me. The mouthpiece was slick with elf-spit. I put it between my lips.
I inhaled.
At first I thought nothing had happened. The common room was exactly as before, the fire dying low in the hearth, the elkmaid slowly quartering out the air as ever she had done. Then I looked around me. The elves were gone. I was alone, save for one slim youth of about my own age, whom I did not recognize.
That youth was you.
Do I frighten you? I frighten myself far more, for I have reached that moment when I see all with doubled sight and apprehend with divided heart. Pray such possession never seizes you. This—now—is what I was shown all these many years ago, and this is the only chance I will ever have to voice my anger and regret to that younger self, who I know will not listen. How could he? A raggedy taverner’s boy with small prospects and a head stuffed full of half-shaped ambitions. What could I say to make him understand how much he is giving up?
By rights, you should have been my child. There’s the bitter nub of the thing, that Becky, who had all but pledged her heart to me, had her get by someone else. A good man, perhaps—they say half the Bridge turned out to launch his fireboat when he was taken by the dropsy—but not me.
I have lost more than years. I have lost the life I was meant to have, children on my knee and a goodwife growing old and fat with me as we sank into our dotage. Someone to carry my memory a few paces beyond the emptiness of the grave, and grandchildren to see sights I will not. These were my birthright, and I have them not. In his callowness and ignorance, my younger self has undone me.
I can see him, even now, running madly after the elves, as he will in the shadowy hour before dawn. Heart pounding with fear that he will not catch up, lungs agonized with effort. Furious to be a hero, to seestrange lands, to know the love of a lady of the am’rta skandayaksa.
They are fickle and cruel, are the elves. Ratanavivicta snatched me from my life on a whim, as casually as she might pick up a bright pebble from the roadside. She cast me aside as easily as she would a gemstone of which she had wearied. There is no faith in her kind.
Ah, it is a dreadful night! The winds prowl the rooftops like cats, bringing in the winter. There’ll be frost by morning, and no mistake.
Is the story over, you ask? Have you not been listening? There is no story. Or else it all—your life and mine and Krodasparasa’s alike—is one story and that story always ending and never coming to a conclusion. But my telling ends now, with my younger self starting from his dream of age and defeat and finding himself abandoned, the sole mortal awake on all the Bridge, with the last of the elf horde gone into the sleeping streets of the city beyond the Dragon Gate.
He will leap to his feet and snatch up his father’s sword from its place over the hearth—there, where my spear hangs now. He will grab a blanket for a cloak and a handful of jerked meat to eat along the road, and nothing more, so great will be his dread of being left behind.
I would not stop him if I could. Run, lad, run! What do you care what becomes of me? Twenty years of glory lie at your feet. The dream is already fading from your head. You feel the breeze from the river as you burst out the door.
Your heart sings.
The moment is past. I have been left behind.
Only now can I admit this. Through all this telling, I have been haunted by a ghost and the name of that ghost was Hope. So long as I had not passed beyond that ancient vision, there was yet the chance that I was not my older self at all, but he who was destined to shake off his doubts and leap out that door. In the innermost reaches of my head, I was still young. The dragon was not slain, the road untravelled, the elves alive, the adventures ahead, the magic not yet passed out of the world.
And now, well. I’m home.
* * * *
PETER S. BEAGLE
Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros
Peter S. Beagle was born in New York City in 1939. Although not prolific by genre standards, he has published four well-received fantasy novels, and his first such, A Fine and Private Place, was widely influential. In fact, Beagle may be the most successful writer of lyrical and evocative modern fantasy since Bradbury, something he proves once again in the gentle, wry, wise, and whimsical story that follows, in which a reclusive professor reluctantly takes on a very unusual roommate …
Beagle’s other books include the novels The Last Unicorn, The Folk of the Air, and, most recently, the critically acclaimed The Innkeeper’s Song, which certainly must be in the running for the title of most successful fantasy novel of the 1990s to date. His short fiction has appeared in such varied places as Seventeen and Ladies Home Journal—as well as in fantasy anthologies such as New Worlds of Fantasy and After the King, and has been collected in The Fantasy Worlds of Peter S. Beagle. His film work includes screenplays for Ralph Bakshi’s animated film The Lord of the Rings, The Last Unicorn, Dove, and an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. He has also written a stage adaptation of The Last Unicorn, the libretto of an opera, The Midnight Angel, and a popular autobiographical travel book, I See By My Outfit. His most recent book is the fantasy anthology Peter S. Beagle’s Immortal Unicorn, edited in collaboration with Janet Berliner. Beagle lives in Davis, California, with his wife, the Indian writer Padma Hejmadi.
* * * *
Professor Gustave Gottesman went to a zoo for the first time when he was thirty-four years old. There is an excellent zoo in Zurich, which was Professor Gottesman’s birthplace, and where his sister still lived, but Professor Gottesman had never been there. From an early age he had determined on the study of philosophy as his life’s work; and for any true philosopher this world is zoo enough, complete with cages, feeding times, breeding programs, and earnest docents, of which he was wise enough to know that he was one. Thus, the first zoo he ever saw was the one in the middle-sized Midwestern American city where he worked at a middle-sized university, teaching Comparative Philosophy in comparative contentment. He was tall and rather thin, with a round, undistinguished face, a snub nose, a random assortment of sandyish hair, and a pair of very intense and very distinguished brown eyes that always seemed to be looking a little deeper than they meant to, embarrassing the face around them no end. His students and colleagues were quite fond of him, in an indulgent sort of way.
And how did the good Professor Gottesman happen at last to visit a zoo? It came about in this way: his older sister Edith came from Zurich to stay with him for several weeks, and she brought her daughter, his niece Nathalie, along with her. Nathalie was seven, both in years, and in the number of her that there sometimes seemed to be, for the Professor had never been used to children even when he was one. She was a generally pleasant little girl, though, as far as he could tell; so when his sister besought him to spend one of his free afternoons with Nathalie while she went to lunch and a gallery opening with an old friend, the Professor graciously consented. And Nathalie wanted very much to go to the zoo and see tigers.
“So you shall,” her uncle announced gallantly. “Just as soon as I find out exactly where the zoo is.” He consulted with his best friend, a fat, cheerful, harmonica-playing professor of medieval Italian poetry named Sally Lowry, who had known him long and well enough (she was the only person in the world who called him Gus) to draw an elaborate two-colored map of the route, write out very precise directions beneath it, and make several copies of this document, in case of accidents. Thus equipped, and accompanied by Charles, Nathalie’s stuffed bedtime tiger, whom she desired to introduce to his grand cousins, they set off together for the zoo on a gray, cool spring afternoon. Professor Gottesman quoted Thomas Hardy to Nathalie, improvising a German translation for her benefit as he went along.
This is the weather the cuckoo likes,
And so do I;
When showers betumble the chestnut spikes,
And nestlings fly.
“Charles likes it too,” Nathalie said. “It makes his fur feel all sweet.” They reached the zoo without incident, thanks to Professor Lowry’s excellent map, and Professor Gottesman bought Nathalie a bag of something sticky, unhealthy, and forbidden, and took her straight off to see the tigers. Their hot, meaty smell and their lightning-colored eyes were a bit too much for him, and so he sat on a bench nearby and watched Nathalie perform the introductions for Charles. When she came back to Professor Gottesman, she told him that Charles had been very well-behaved, as had all the tigers but one, who was rudely indifferent. “He was probably just visiting,” she said. “A tourist or something.”
The Professor was still marvelling at the amount of contempt one small girl could infuse into the word tourist, when he heard a voice, sounding almost at his shoulder, say, “Why, Professor Gottesman—how nice to see you at last.” It was a low voice, a bit hoarse, with excellent diction, speaking good Zurich German with a very slight, unplaceable accent.
Professor Gottesman turned quickly, half-expecting to see some old acquaintance from home, whose name he would inevitably have forgotten. Such embarrassments were altogether too common in his gently preoccupied life. His friend Sally Lowry once observed, “We see each other just about every day, Gus, and I’m still not sure you really recognize me. If I wanted to hide from you, I’d just change my hairstyle.”
There was no one at all behind him. The only thing he saw was the rutted, muddy rhinoceros yard, for some reason placed directly across from the big cats’ cages. The one rhinoceros in residence was standing by the fence, torpidly mumbling a mouthful of moldy-looking hay. It was an Indian rhinoceros, according to the placard on the gate: as big as the Professor’s compact car, and the approximate color of old cement. The creaking slabs of its skin smelled of stale urine, and it had only one horn, caked with sticky mud. Flies buzzed around its small, heavy-lidded eyes, which regarded Professor Gottesman with immense, ancient unconcern. But there was no other person in the vicinity who might have addressed him.
Professor Gottesman shook his head, scratched it, shook it again, and turned back to the tigers. But the voice came again. “Professor, it was indeed I who spoke. Come and talk to me, if you please.”
No need, surely, to go into Professor Gottesman’s reaction: to describe in detail how he gasped, turned pale, and looked wildly around for any corroborative witness. It is worth mentioning, however, that at no time did he bother to splutter the requisite splutter in such cases: “My God, I’m either dreaming, drunk, or crazy.” If he was indeed just as classically absentminded and impractical as everyone who knew him agreed, he was also more of a realist than many of them. This is generally true of philosophers, who tend, as a group, to be on terms of mutual respect with the impossible. Therefore, Professor Gottesman did the only proper thing under the circumstances. He introduced his niece Nathalie to the rhinoceros.
Nathalie, for all her virtues, was not a philosopher, and could not hear the rhinoceros’s gracious greeting. She was, however, seven years old, and a well-brought-up seven-year-old has no difficulty with the notion that a rhinoceros—or a goldfish, or a coffee table—might be able to talk; nor in accepting that some people can hear coffee-table speech and some people cannot. She said a polite hello to the rhinoceros, and then became involved in her own conversation with stuffed Charles, who apparently had a good deal to say himself about tigers.
“A mannerly child,” the rhinoceros commented. “One sees so few here. Most of them throw things.”
His mouth dry, and his voice shaky but contained, Professor Gottesman asked carefully, “Tell me, if you will—can all rhinoceri speak, or only the Indian species?” He wished furiously that he had thought to bring along his notebook.
“I have no idea,” the rhinoceros answered him candidly. “I myself, as it happens, am a unicorn.”
Professor Gottesman wiped his balding forehead. “Please,” he said earnestly. “Please. A rhinoceros, even a rhinoceros that speaks, is as real a creature as I. A unicorn, on the other hand, is a being of pure fantasy, like mermaids, or dragons, or the chimera. I consider very little in this universe as absolutely, indisputably certain, but I would feel so much better if you could see your way to being merely a talking rhinoceros. For my sake, if not your own.”
It seemed to the Professor that the rhinoceros chuckled slightly, but it might only have been a ruminant’s rumbling stomach. “My Latin designation is Rhinoceros unicornis,” the great animal remarked. “You may have noticed it on the sign.”
Professor Gottesman dismissed the statement as brusquely as he would have if the rhinoceros had delivered it in class. “Yes, yes, yes, and the manatee, which suckles its young erect in the water and so gave rise to the myth of the mermaid, is assigned to the order sirenia. Classification is not proof.”
“And proof,” came the musing response, “is not necessarily truth. You look at me and see a rhinoceros, because I am not white, not graceful, far from beautiful, and my horn is no elegant spiral but a bludgeon of matted hair. But suppose that you had grown up expecting a unicorn to look and behave and smell exactly as I do—would not the rhinoceros then be the legend? Suppose that everything you believed about unicorns—everything except the way they look—were true of me? Consider the possibilities, Professor, while you push the remains of that bun under the gate.”
Professor Gottesman found a stick and poked the grimy bit of pastry— about the same shade as the rhinoceros, it was—where the creature could wrap a prehensile upper lip around it. He said, somewhat tentatively, “Very well. The unicorn’s horn was supposed to be an infallible guide to detecting poisons.”
“The most popular poisons of the Middle Ages and Renaissance,” replied the rhinoceros, “were alkaloids. Pour one of those into a goblet made of compressed hair, and see what happens.” It belched resoundingly, and Nathalie giggled.
Professor Gottesman, who was always invigorated by a good argument with anyone, whether colleague, student, or rhinoceros, announced, “Isidore of Seville wrote in the seventh century that the unicorn was a cruel beast, that it would seek out elephants and lions to fight with them. Rhinoceri are equally known for their fierce, aggressive nature, which often leads them to attack anything that moves in their shortsighted vision. What have you to say to that?”
“Isidore of Seville,” said the rhinoceros thoughtfully, “was a most learned man, much like your estimable self, who never saw a rhinoceros in his life, or an elephant either, being mainly preoccupied with church history and canon law. I believe he did see a lion at some point. If your charming niece is quite done with her snack?”
“She is not,” Professor Gottesman answered, “and do not change the subject. If you are indeed a unicorn, what are you doing scavenging dirty buns and candy in this public establishment? It is an article of faith that a unicorn can only be taken by a virgin, in whose innocent embrace the ferocious creature becomes meek and docile. Are you prepared to tell me that you were captured under such circumstances?”
The rhinoceros was silent for some little while before it spoke again. “I cannot,” it said judiciously, “vouch for the sexual history of the gentleman in the baseball cap who fired a tranquilizer dart into my left shoulder. I would, however, like to point out that the young of our species on occasion become trapped in vines and slender branches which entangle their horns—and that the Latin for such branches is virge. What Isidore of Seville made of all this…” It shrugged, which is difficult for a rhinoceros, and a remarkable thing to see.
“Sophistry,” said the Professor, sounding unpleasantly beleaguered even in his own ears. “Casuistry. Semantics. Chop-logic. The fact remains, a rhinoceros is and a unicorn isn’t.” This last sounds much more impressive in German. “You will excuse me,” he went on, “but we have other specimens to visit, do we not, Nathalie?”
“No,” Nathalie said. “Charles and I just wanted to see the tigers.”
“Well, we have seen the tigers,” Professor Gottesman said through his teeth. “And I believe it is beginning to rain, so we will go home now.” He took Nathalie’s hand firmly and stood up, as that obliging child snuggled Charles firmly under her arm and bobbed a demure European curtsy to the rhinoceros. It bent its head to her, the mud-thick horn almost brushing the ground. Professor Gottesman, mildest of men, snatched her away.
“Good-bye, Professor,” came the hoarse, placid voice behind him. “I look forward to our next meeting.” The words were somewhat muffled, because Nathalie had tossed the remainder of her sticky snack into the yard as her uncle hustled her off. Professor Gottesman did not turn his head.
