Nebula Awards Showcase 2008 (20 page)

He tossed the thing away and picked up the hoof again, not singing, only touching it very lightly with one finger, brushing across it again and again. Then he set the foot down, and the horse stamped once, hard, and whinnied, and the tall man turned to the woman and said, “We ought to camp here for the night, all the same. They’re both weary, and my back hurts.”

The woman laughed. A deep, sweet, slow sound, it was. I’d never heard a laugh like that. She said, “The greatest wizard walking the world, and your back hurts? Heal it as you healed mine, the time the tree fell on me. That took you all of five minutes, I believe.”

“Longer than that,” the man answered her. “You were delirious, you wouldn’t remember.” He touched her hair, which was thick and pretty, even though it was mostly gray. “You know how I am about that,” he said. “I still like being mortal too much to use magic on myself. It spoils it somehow—it dulls the feeling. I’ve told you before.”

The woman said, “Mmphh,” the way I’ve heard my mother say it a thousand times. “Well, I’ve been mortal all my life, and some days…”

She didn’t finish what she was saying, and the tall man smiled, the way you could tell he was teasing her. “Some days, what?”

“Nothing,” the woman said, “nothing, nothing.” She sounded irritable for a moment, but she put her hands on the man’s arms, and she said in a different voice, “Some days—some early mornings—when the wind smells of blossoms I’ll never see, and there are fawns playing in the misty orchards, and you’re yawning and mumbling and scratching your head, and growling that we’ll see rain before nightfall, and probably hail as well…on such mornings I wish with all my heart that we could both live forever, and I think you were a great fool to give it up.” She laughed again, but it sounded shaky now, a little. She said, “Then I remember things I’d rather not remember, so then my stomach acts up, and all sorts of other things start twingeing me—never mind what they are, or where they hurt, whether it’s my body or my head, or my heart. And then I think, no, I suppose not, maybe not.” The tall man put his arms around her, and for a moment she rested her head on his chest. I couldn’t hear what she said after that.

I didn’t think I’d made any noise, but the man raised his voice a little, not looking at me, not lifting his head, and he said, “Child, there’s food here.” First I couldn’t move, I was so frightened. He couldn’t have seen me through the brush and all the alder trees. And then I started remembering how hungry I was, and I started toward them without knowing I was doing it. I actually looked down at my feet and watched them moving like somebody else’s feet, as though they were the hungry ones, only they had to have me take them to the food. The man and the woman stood very still and waited for me.

Close to, the woman looked younger than her voice, and the tall man looked older. No, that isn’t it, that’s not what I mean. She wasn’t young at all, but the gray hair made her face younger, and she held herself really straight, like the lady who comes when people in our village are having babies. She holds her face all stiff too, that one, and I don’t like her much. This woman’s face wasn’t beautiful, I suppose, but it was a face you’d want to snuggle up to on a cold night. That’s the best I know how to say it.

The man…one minute he looked younger than my father, and the next he’d be looking older than anybody I ever saw, older than people are supposed to be, maybe. He didn’t have any gray hair himself, but he did have a lot of lines, but that’s not what I’m talking about either. It was the eyes. His eyes were green, green, green, not like grass, not like emeralds—I saw an emerald once, a gypsy woman showed me—and not anything like apples or limes or such stuff. Maybe like the ocean, except I’ve never seen the ocean, so I don’t know. If you go deep enough into the woods (not the Midwood, of course not, but any other sort of woods), sooner or later you’ll always come to a place where even the shadows are green, and that’s the way his eyes were. I was afraid of his eyes at first.

The woman gave me a peach and watched me bite into it, too hungry to thank her. She asked me, “Girl, what are you doing here? Are you lost?”

“No, I’m not,” I mumbled with my mouth full. “I just don’t know where I am, that’s different.” They both laughed, but it wasn’t a mean, making-fun laugh. I told them, “My name’s Sooz, and I have to see the king. He lives somewhere right nearby, doesn’t he?”

They looked at each other. I couldn’t tell what they were thinking, but the tall man raised his eyebrows, and the woman shook her head a bit, slowly. They looked at each other for a long time, until the woman said, “Well, not nearby, but not so very far, either. We were bound on our way to visit him ourselves.”

“Good,” I said. “Oh, good.” I was trying to sound as grownup as they were, but it was hard, because I was so happy to find out that they could take me to the king. I said, “I’ll go along with you, then.”

The woman was against it before I got the first words out. She said to the tall man, “No, we couldn’t. We don’t know how things are.” She looked sad about it, but she looked firm, too. She said, “Girl, it’s not you worries me. The king is a good man, and an old friend, but it has been a long time, and kings change. Even more than other people, kings change.”

“I have to see him,” I said. “You go on, then. I’m not going home until I see him.” I finished the peach, and the man handed me a chunk of dried fish and smiled at the woman as I tore into it. He said quietly to her, “It seems to me that you and I both remember asking to be taken along on a quest. I can’t speak for you, but I begged.”

But the woman wouldn’t let up. “We could be bringing her into great peril. You can’t take the chance, it isn’t right!”

He began to answer her, but I interrupted—my mother would have slapped me halfway across the kitchen. I shouted at them, “I’m coming from great peril. There’s a griffin nested in the Midwood, and he’s eaten Jehane and Louli and—and my Felicitas—” and then I did start weeping, and I didn’t care. I just stood there and shook and wailed, and dropped the dried fish. I tried to pick it up, still crying so hard I couldn’t see it, but the woman stopped me and gave me her scarf to dry my eyes and blow my nose. It smelled nice.

“Child,” the tall man kept saying, “child, don’t take on so, we didn’t know about the griffin.” The woman was holding me against her side, smoothing my hair and glaring at him as though it was his fault that I was howling like that. She said, “Of course we’ll take you with us, girl dear—there, never mind, of course we will. That’s a fearful matter, a griffin, but the king will know what to do about it. The king eats griffins for breakfast snacks—spreads them on toast with orange marmalade and gobbles them up, I promise you.” And so on, being silly, but making me feel better, while the man went on pleading with me not to cry. I finally stopped when he pulled a big red handkerchief out of his pocket, twisted and knotted it into a bird-shape, and made it fly away. Uncle Ambrose does tricks with coins and shells, but he can’t do anything like that.

His name was Schmendrick, which I still think is the funniest name I’ve heard in my life. The woman’s name was Molly Grue. We didn’t leave right away, because of the horses, but made camp where we were instead. I was waiting for the man, Schmendrick, to do it by magic, but he only built a fire, set out their blankets, and drew water from the stream like anyone else, while she hobbled the horses and put them to graze. I gathered firewood.

The woman, Molly, told me that the king’s name was Lir, and that they had known him when he was a very young man, before he became king. “He is a true hero,” she said, “a dragonslayer, a giantkiller, a rescuer of maidens, a solver of impossible riddles. He may be the greatest hero of all, because he’s a good man as well. They aren’t always.”

“But you didn’t want me to meet him,” I said. “Why was that?”

Molly sighed. We were sitting under a tree, watching the sun go down, and she was brushing things out of my hair. She said, “He’s old now. Schmendrick has trouble with time—I’ll tell you why one day, it’s a long story—and he doesn’t understand that Lir may no longer be the man he was. It could be a sad reunion.” She started braiding my hair around my head, so it wouldn’t get in the way. “I’ve had an unhappy feeling about this journey from the beginning, Sooz. But he took a notion that Lir needed us, so here we are. You can’t argue with him when he gets like that.”

“A good wife isn’t supposed to argue with her husband,” I said. “My mother says you wait until he goes out, or he’s asleep, and then you do what you want.”

Molly laughed, that rich, funny sound of hers, like a kind of deep gurgle. “Sooz, I’ve only known you a few hours, but I’d bet every penny I’ve got right now—aye, and all of Schmendrick’s too—that you’ll be arguing on your wedding night with whomever you marry. Anyway, Schmendrick and I aren’t married. We’re together, that’s all. We’ve been together quite a long while.”

“Oh,” I said. I didn’t know any people who were together like that, not the way she said it. “Well, you look married. You sort of do.”

Molly’s face didn’t change, but she put an arm around my shoulders and hugged me close for a moment. She whispered in my ear, “I wouldn’t marry him if he were the last man in the world. He eats wild radishes in bed. Crunch, crunch, crunch, all night—crunch, crunch, crunch.” I giggled, and the tall man looked over at us from where he was washing a pan in the stream. The last of the sunlight was on him, and those green eyes were bright as new leaves. One of them winked at me, and I felt it, the way you feel a tiny breeze on your skin when it’s hot. Then he went back to scrubbing the pan.

“Will it take us long to reach the king?” I asked her. “You said he didn’t live too far, and I’m scared the griffin will eat somebody else while I’m gone. I need to be home.”

Molly finished with my hair and gave it a gentle tug in back to bring my head up and make me look straight into her eyes. They were as gray as Schmendrick’s were green, and I already knew that they turned darker or lighter gray depending on her mood. “What do you expect to happen when you meet King Lir, Sooz?” she asked me right back. “What did you have in mind when you set off to find him?”

I was surprised. “Well, I’m going to get him to come back to my village with me. All those knights he keeps sending aren’t doing any good at all, so he’ll just have to take care of that griffin himself. He’s the king. It’s his job.”

“Yes,” Molly said, but she said it so softly I could barely hear her. She patted my arm once, lightly, and then she got up and walked away to sit by herself near the fire. She made it look as though she was banking the fire, but she wasn’t really.

We started out early the next morning. Molly had me in front of her on her horse for a time, but by and by Schmendrick took me up on his, to spare the other one’s sore foot. He was more comfortable to lean against than I’d expected—bony in some places, nice and springy in others. He didn’t talk much, but he sang a lot as we went along, sometimes in languages I couldn’t make out a word of, sometimes making up silly songs to make me laugh, like this one:

 

Soozli, Soozli,

speaking loozli,

you disturb my oozli-goozli.

Soozli, Soozli,

would you choozli

to become my squoozli-squoozli?

 

He didn’t do anything magic, except maybe once, when a crow kept diving at the horse—out of meanness; that’s all, there wasn’t a nest anywhere—making the poor thing dance and shy and skitter until I almost fell off. Schmendrick finally turned in the saddle and looked at it, and the next minute a hawk came swooping out of nowhere and chased that crow screaming into a thornbush where the hawk couldn’t follow. I guess that was magic.

It was actually pretty country we were passing through, once we got onto the proper road. Trees, meadows, little soft valleys, hillsides covered with wildflowers I didn’t know. You could see they got a lot more rain here than we do where I live. It’s a good thing sheep don’t need grazing, the way cows do. They’ll go where the goats go, and goats will go anywhere. We’re like that in my village, we have to be. But I liked this land better.

Schmendrick told me it hadn’t always been like that. “Before Lir, this was all barren desert where nothing grew—nothing, Sooz. It was said that the country was under a curse, and in a way it was, but I’ll tell you about that another time.” People always say that when you’re a child, and I hate it. “But Lir changed everything. The land was so glad to see him that it began blooming and blossoming the moment he became king, and it has done so ever since. Except poor Hagsgate, but that’s another story too.” His voice got slower and deeper when he talked about Hagsgate, as though he weren’t talking to me.

I twisted my neck around to look up at him. “Do you think King Lir will come back with me and kill that griffin? I think Molly thinks he won’t, because he’s so old.” I hadn’t known I was worried about that until I actually said it.

“Why, of course he will, girl.” Schmendrick winked at me again. “He never could resist the plea of a maiden in distress, the more difficult and dangerous the deed, the better. If he did not spur to your village’s aid himself at the first call, it was surely because he was engaged on some other heroic venture. I’m as certain as I can be that as soon as you make your request—remember to curtsey properly—he’ll snatch up his great sword and spear, whisk you up to his saddlebow, and be off after your griffin with the road smoking behind him. Young or old, that’s always been his way.” He rumpled my hair in the back. “Molly overworries. That’s her way. We are who we are.”

“What’s a curtsey?” I asked him. I know now, because Molly showed me, but I didn’t then. He didn’t laugh, except with his eyes, then gestured for me to face forward again as he went back to singing.

 

Soozli, Soozli,

you amuse me,

right down to my solesli-shoesli.

Soozli, Soozli,

I bring newsli—

we could wed next stewsli-Tuesli.