The year0 edition, p.23
The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2010 Edition, page 23
The indispensable counsellor inclined his head modestly. “I was but taking thought for your majesty’s comfort,” he said.
Before he or the king could say more, the king’s bard, who was looking off through the trees, caught sight of a gleam of light far off among them. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing.
The company all turned to look, with much champing of bits but not many stamped hooves, for the horses were tired at the end of such a day. “It is a light, and that means there must be habitation,” the king said, with a little less confidence than he might have said it in any other part of the kingdom. The Great Forest had a certain reputation for unchanciness.
“I don’t know of any habitation in this direction,” said the master of the hunt, squinting at the light.
“It will be some rude peasant dwelling, rat ridden and flea infested, far less comfortable than your own pavilions,” the counsellor said, stroking his fine white beard. “Let us set them up here and pay no attention to it.”
“Why, where’s your spirit of adventure?” the bard asked the counsellor. The king smiled, for the bard’s question was much after his own heart.
The king raised his voice. “We will ride on to discover what that gleam of light might be.” In a lower tone, as the company prepared to ride off, he added to the counsellor, “Even if you are right, and no doubt you are, at the very least we will be able to borrow fire from them, which will make our camp less cold.”
“Very wise, your majesty,” the counsellor said.
They rode off through the twilight forest. They were a fine company, all dressed for hunting, not for court, but in silks and satins and velvets and rare furs, with enough gold and silver about them and their horses to show that they were no ordinary hunters. The ladies among them rode astride, like the men, and all of them, men and women, were beautiful, for the king was young and as yet unmarried and would have noabout him who did not please his eye. Their horses were fine beasts, with arching necks and smooth coats, though too tired now to make the show they had made when they had ridden out that morning. The last rays of the sun had gilded them in the clearing, touching the golden circlet the king wore about his dark unruly locks; now they went forward into deepening night. The sky above them was violet, and a crescent moon shone silver like a sword blade. The first stars were beginning to pierce the sky when they splashed across a brook and saw a little village.
“What place is this?” the king asked the master of the hunt.
“I don’t know, sire. Unless we have come sadly astray it isn’t marked on my map,” the master of the hunt said.
“We must have come astray then,” the king said, laughing. “I don’t think the worse of you for it, for we were following a hart through the forest, and though we didn’t kill it, I can’t think when I had a better day’s sport. But look, man, this is a stone-built village with a mill and a blacksmith’s forge, and an inn. This is a snug little manor. A road runs through it. Why, it must pay quite five pounds of gold in taxes.”
The counsellor smiled to himself, for he had been the king’s tutor when he was a prince, and was glad to see he remembered the detail of such matters.
The master of the hunt shook his head. “I am sure your majesty is right, but I can’t find it on my map.”
“Let us go on and investigate,” the bard said.
It had been the red gleam of the forge they had seen from far off, but it was the lamplight spilling out of the windows of the inn that the bard waved toward.
“Such a place will not hold all of us,” the king said. “Have the tents set up for us to sleep, but let us see if we can get a hot supper from this place, whatever it is.”
“A hot supper and some country ale,” the bard said.
“There are three white cows in the water meadow beside the stream,” the master of the hunt pointed out. “The country cheese in these parts is said to be very good.”
“If you knew what parts these were, no doubt my counsellor could tell us all about their cheeses,” the king said.
They dismounted and left the horses to the care of those who were to set up the tents. The four of them strode into the village to investigate. The bard brought his little harp, the counsellor brought his purse, the master of the hunt brought a shortsword on his belt, but the king brought nothing.
The inn was warm and friendly and seemed to contain the whole population of the village. Those who were not there came in as soon as the news came to them of the king’s arrival. The counsellor negotiated with the innkeeper and soon arranged that food and drink could be provided for the whole company, and beds for the king and the ladies, if the ladies did not mind crowding in together. The master of the hunt pronounced the ale excellent, and the villagers began to beg the bard to play. The rest of the company, having set up the tents and rubbed down the horses, began to trickle into the inn, and the place became very full.
The king wandered around the inn, looking at everything. He examined the row of strange objects that sat on the mantelpiece, he peered out through the diamond-paned windows, he picked up the scuttle beside the fire and ran his hand along the wood of the chair backs, worn smooth by countless customers. The villagers felt a little shy of him, with his crown and his curling black beard, and did not dare to strike up conversation. For his own part he felt restless and was not sure why. He felt as if something was about to happen. Until the bard started to play, he thought he was waiting for music, and until he was served a plate of cold pork and hot cabbage he thought he was waiting for his dinner, but neither of these things satisfied him. Neither the villagers nor his own company delighted him. The villagers seemed simple, humble, rustic; their homespun clothes and country accents grated on him. In contrast, the gorgeous raiment and noble tones of his company, which were well enough in the palace or even his hunting lodge, seemed here overrefined to the point of decadence.
At length the door at the back opened and a girl came in, clad all in grey and carrying a basket. The master of the hunt had called for cheese, and she was the girl who kept the cows and made the cheese. She was plain almost to severity, with her hair drawn back from her face, but she was young and dignified, and when the king saw her he knew that she was what he had been waiting for, not just that night but for a long time. He had been picking at his dinner, but he stood when he saw her. There was a little circle of quiet around the corner where he sat, for his own people had seen that he did not want conversation. The girl glanced at him and nodded, as if to tell him to wait, and went with her basket to the innkeeper and began to negotiate a price for her cheese. The king sat down and waited meekly.
When she had disposed of her cheeses, the girl in grey picked her way through the room and sat down opposite the king. “I have been waiting for you all my life. I will marry you and make you my queen,” he said. He had been thinking all the time she was at the bar what he would say when she came up to him, and getting the words right in his mind. For the first time he was glad he was king, that he was young and handsome, that he had so much to offer her.
“Oh, I know that story,” she said. She took his ale tankard and breathed on it, and passed it back to him. He looked into it and saw the two of them tiny and distant, in the palace, quarrelling. “You’d pile me with jewels and I’d wither in that palace. You’d want me to be something I’m not. I’m no queen. I’m no beauty, no diplomat. I speak too bluntly. You’d grow tired of me and want a proper queen. I’d go into a decline and die after I had a daughter, and you’d marry again and give her a stepmother who’d persecute her.”
“But I have loved you since I first saw you,” the king insisted, although her words and the vision had shaken him. He took a deep draft of the ale to drive them away.
“Love? Well now. You feel what you feel, and I feel what I feel, but that doesn’t mean you have to fit us into a story and wreck both our lives.”
“Then you . . .” the king hesitated. “I know that story. You’re the goddess Sovranty, whom the king meets disguised in a village, who spends one night with him and confirms his sacred kingship.”
She laughed. “You still don’t see me. I’m no goddess. I know that story though. We’d have our one night of passion, which would confirm you in your crown, and you’d go back to your palace, and nine months later I’d have a baby boy. Twenty years after that he’d come questing for the father he never had.” She took up a twist of straw that was on the table and set it walking. The king saw the shape of a hero hidden among the people, then the straw touched his hand and fell back to the table in separate strands.
“Tell me who you are,” the king said.
“I’m the girl who keeps the cows and makes the cheeses,” she said. “I’ve lived in this village all my life, and in this village we don’t have stories, not real stories, just things that come to us out of the twilight now and then. My parents died five years ago when the fever came, and since then I’ve lived alone. I’m plain, and plainspoken. I don’t have many friends. I always see too much, and say what I see.”
“And you wear grey, always,” the king said, looking at her.
She met his eyes. “Yes, I do, I wear grey always, but how did you know?”
“When you’re a king, it’s hard to get away from being part of a story,” he said. “Those stories you mentioned aren’t about us. They’re about a king and a village girl and a next generation of stories. I’d like to make a new story that was about you and me, the people we really are, getting to know each other.” He put out his hand to her.
“Oh, that’s hard,” she said, ignoring his hand. “That’s very hard. Would I have to give up being a silver salmon leaping in the stream at twilight?”
“Not if that’s who you are,” he said, his green eyes steady on hers.
“Would I have to stop being a grey cat slipping through the dusky shadows, seeing what’s to be seen?”
“Not if that’s who you are,” he said, unwavering.
“Would I have to stop being a grey girl who lives alone and makes the cheeses, who walks along the edges of stories but never steps into them?”
“Not if that’s who you are,” said the king. “But I’m asking you to step into a new story, a story that’s never been before, to shape it with me.”
“Oh, that’s hard,” she said, but she put her hand on the king’s hand where it lay on the rough wooden table. “You’ve no sons, have you?”
“No sons, but I have two younger brothers,” he said, exhilaration sweeping through him.
She looked around the room. “Your fine bard is singing a song, and your master of the hunt is eating cheese. Your counsellor is taking counsel with the innkeeper, and no doubt hearing all about the affairs of the village. Your lords and ladies are drinking and eating and patronising the villagers. If you really want to give up being a king and step into a new story with me, now is the time.”
“What do I have to do?” he asked, very quietly, then she pulled his hand and for a moment he felt himself falling.
It was a little while before anyone noticed he had gone, and by then noremembered seeing the two cats slipping away between the tables, one grey and one a long-haired black with big green eyes.
NECROFLUX DAY
JOHN MEANEY
For Dad’s sake, Carl tried to pretend that supper at Shadbolt’s Halt was terrific, but they both know otherwise. Last year, on Carl’s eleventh birthday, they’d truly had a great time. Tonight, exactly a year later, the atmosphere was quieter, a reflection of the greater tension enveloping the city.
The food was good: komodo steak and buttery mashed tubers, then squealberry pie and ice cream, washed down with hot blue chocolate. But no waiters came out to sing Happy Birthday, and Carl and Dad were seated behind a heavy pillar, where entirely human diners could not see the hint of otherness in father and son as they ate.
Even the flamewraiths, dancing (in their minimized aspect) inside wall-mounted crystalline bowls, seemed to have caught the tension. How a flame could appear angular or edgy was beyond Carl, but he knew what he sensed—and while he could never be a Bone Listener like Dad, he knew how to perceive deeply.
Last night, he’d overheard Dad talking to their neighbour, Mr. Varlin. One of the words had been unfamiliar to him, so he’d pulled down the old Fortinium Dictionary that smelled of dust, and now he wondered at the implications of “pogrom” appearing in an old man’s description of the way Tristopolis was changing.
“Er, Dad?” Carl wanted to change the mood, and thinking of Tristopolis had reminded him of something. “Do you know much about the city’s founding?”
“Has Sister Stephanie-Charon set you some homework about the Tri-Millennial?”
“We have to write an essay for next week.”
“So you know I can’t help you.”
Dad—Jamie Thargulis to the adult world—had access to the Lattice, which was out of the reach of most Bone Listeners, never mind standard humans. Now, as Dad blinked his dark-brown bulbous eyes, Carl wondered what it truly meant to work as an Archivist, to immerse oneself in the centuries-old flow of understanding.
“I wasn’t trying to cheat, Dad.”
“Sorry, son. I know. So do you want to take a swing past Möbius Park? I hear they’re testing the parade balloons tonight.”
The celebration was three months away. Carl had watched the St Lazlo Day parade last year. He and Dad had stood next to a group of true believers, their foreheads marked with the cobalt-pigment Sign of the Holy Reaver, which they would not erase until the Feast of Magnus.
“Will we see the parade?”
“I don’t know, son. This year, things are . . . Well. Maybe we’ll just stay at home.”
“OK.”
“You’re finished?”
Carl nodded, and Dad turned to gesture towards a waiter. The man came with the bill in hand, already written, as though he had known that Dad would not be ordering anything more.
Dad counted out three nine-florin coins, then looked up at the waiter.
“Thank you for the service.”
He added a thirteen-sided coin to the amount.
“Goodbye, sir,” said the waiter.
Dad, still seated, swallowed.
The street, wide and bordered with centuries-old architecture, looked dim beneath the eternally deep-purple sky. Carl and Dad stood in a patch of orange light thrown by the restaurant windows, buttoning up their overcoats. Wearing his fedora, Dad looked standard human. He waved to a purple taxi. The cab slowed, then accelerated, and was past them.
“Sharp eyesight,” muttered Dad.
A stone gargoyle glided overhead, high up.
“I’d like to walk,” said Carl.
“All right, son. Let’s do that.”
They strolled to Illbeck Pentangle, where the traffic was heavy and it took a while to cross, then continued to the high stone walls of Möbius Park. They followed the road outside the walls, keeping to the other side of the road. At school, some older boys had scorned the stories of lone pedestrians disappearing forever—not just intruders, who deserved whatever happened—but Dad was always careful here, and he was an Archivist who worked for the city.
“The South-South-East Gate,” he said. “Looks like it’s open.”
Tall and formed of black iron, the gates were closed whenever possible. Now, Carl could see along the gentle curved of Actualisation Arc, bordered by dark parkland, and the black-grass clearing where half-inflated balloons were rising.
“There’s a Leviathan.” He pointed. “See?”
But what he really noticed was the faint silver glimmer of the force-shield that contained ravenous ectoplasma wraiths among the trees. Beyond, deep inside Möbius Park, reared the great skull outline of City Hall.
“I thought,” muttered Dad, “there’d be more to see.”
“No, this is great.”
“We could get some juice at—”
“It would be nice to go home.”
“We’ll take the hypotube, in that case.”
A floating amber P-sign indicated a Pneumetro station, two blocks along a street that headed away from the park. It took a few minutes to walk the distance, before descending to a Magenta Line platform just as a train slid in.
“Good timing,” said Dad.
They boarded the last ovoid carriage, which would split off at the next branch line, Magenta 7. As they sat, Carl noticed a scaly-skinned man who was watching a group of standard-human youths. They waved red beer-bottles, foul-mouthing each other and the world.
A percussive wave kicked the train into motion. Then necromagnetic windings in the tunnel walls—Sister Stef had explained it to the class—boosted the acceleration. Carl turned to ask Dad about it; but Dad, too, was observing the youths.
When the train stopped at Wailmore Twist, the youths got off. The scaly-skinned man glanced at Dad, then opened a copy of the Tristopolitan Gazette, and held it up as a shield. He didn’t lower the paper even when the train rattled going through Shadebourne Depths. Here, the station was disused; but the slum tenements up above (where Carl was not supposed to wander) included the boarding house where Sister Stef had stayed as a newly arrived immigrant, before coming to the school and joining the Order of Thanatos. She’d told her story to the class.
Dad and Carl got off at Bitterwell Keys, and climbed the winding stairs to street level. A fine quicksilver rain was falling as they crossed Blamechurch Avenue, and reached the purplestone house that they called home.
“Happy Birthday, son.”
“Yes. Thanks, Dad.”
In his bedroom, Carl leaned against the iron frame, knowing what Dad was doing downstairs. In the parlour, dark and polished, he was holding his favourite blue-and-white photograph of his dead wife, Mareela. For Carl, she—Mother—existed only as blurred images of warmth, dark hair and a smile.
He’d been two years old when she died.
Mareela Thargulis had been standard human, and pretty. From her, Carl inherited his green eyes, so incongruous in a face that otherwise marked him as of Bone Listener stock. It was a sign that, while he might carry his father’s blood, hearing the resonance of bones, living or dead, would be forever beyond him.
