Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe (4 page)

We were approaching the top of the hill. It was dusk. The sky was the color of wine, now, and the clouds in the west glowed with the light of the setting sun, although from where we were standing it had already dropped below the horizon.

“You’ll see, when we get up there. It’s perfectly flat, the top of the hill.”

I wanted to contribute something, so I said, “Where I come from, five hundred years ago the local lord was visiting the king. And the king showed off his enormous table, his candles, his beautiful painted ceiling, and as each one was displayed, instead of praising it, the lord simply said, ‘I have a finer, and bigger, and better one.’ The king wanted to call his bluff, so he told him that the following month he would come and eat at this table, bigger and finer than the king’s, lit by candles in candleholders bigger and finer than the king’s, under a ceiling painting bigger and better than the king’s.”

My guide said, “Did he lay out a tablecloth on the flatness of the hill, and have twenty brave men holding candles, and did they dine beneath God’s own stars? They tell a story like that in these parts, too.”

“That’s the story,” I admitted, slightly miffed that my contribution had been so casually dismissed. “And the king acknowledged that the lord was right.”

“Didn’t the boss have him imprisoned, and tortured?” asked my guide. “That’s what happened in the version of the story they tell hereabouts. They say that the man never even made it as far as the Cordon Bleu dessert his chef had whipped up. They found him on the following day with his hands cut off, his severed tongue placed neatly in his breast pocket and a final bullet hole in his forehead.”

“Here? In the house back there?”

“Good Lord, no. They left his body in his nightclub. Over in the city.”

I was surprised how quickly dusk had ended. There was still a glow in the west, but the rest of the sky had become night, plum- purple in its majesty.

“The days before the full of the moon, in the labyrinth,” he said. “They were set aside for the infirm, and those in need. My sister had a women’s condition. They told her it would be fatal if she didn’t have her insides all scraped out, and then it might be fatal anyway. Her stomach had swollen up as if she was carrying a baby, not a tumor, although she must have been pushing fifty. She came up here when the moon was a day from full and she walked the labyrinth. Walked it from the outside in, in the moon’s light, and she walked it from the center back to the outside, with no false steps or mistakes.”

“What happened to her?”

“She lived,” he said, shortly.

We crested the hill, but I could not see what I was looking at. It was too dark.

“They delivered her of the thing inside her. It lived as well, for a while.” He paused. Then he tapped my arm. “Look over there.”

I turned and looked. The size of the moon astonished me. I know it’s an optical illusion, that the moon grows no smaller as it rises, but this moon seemed to take up so much of the horizon as it rose that I found myself thinking of the old Frank Frazetta paperback covers, in which men with their swords raised would be silhouetted in front of huge moons, and I remembered paintings of wolves howling on hilltops, black cutouts against the circle of snow-white moon that framed them. The enormous moon that was rising was the creamy yellow of freshly churned butter.

“Is the moon full?” I asked.

“That’s a full moon, all right.” He sounded satisfied. “And there’s the labyrinth.”

We walked toward it. I had expected to see ash on the ground, or nothing. Instead, in the buttery moonlight, I saw a maze, complex and elegant, made of circles and whorls arranged inside a huge square. I could not judge distances properly in that light, but I thought that each side of the square must be two hundred feet or more.

The plants that outlined the maze were low to the ground, though. None of them was more than a foot tall. I bent down, picked a needle-like leaf, black in the moonlight, and crushed it between finger and thumb. I inhaled, and thought of raw lamb, carefully dismembered and prepared, and placed in an oven on a bed of branch-like leaves that smelled just like this.

“I thought you people burned all this to the ground,” I said.

“We did. They aren’t hedges, not any longer. But things grow again, in their season. There’s no killing some things. Rosemary’s tough.”

“Where’s the entrance?”

“You’re standing in it,” he said. He was an old man who walked with a stick and talked to strangers, I thought. Nobody would ever miss him.

“So what happened up here when the moon was full?”

“Locals didn’t walk the labyrinth then. That was the one night that paid for all.”

I took a step into the maze. There was nothing difficult about it, not with the little rosemary hedges that marked it no higher than my shins, no higher than a kitchen garden. If I got lost, I could simply step over the bushes, walk back out. But for now I followed the path into the labyrinth. It was easy to make out the way in the light of the full moon. I could hear my guide, as he continued to talk.

“Some folk thought even that price was too high. That was why we came up here, why we burned the lunar labyrinth. We came up that hill when the moon was dark, and we carried burning torches, like in the old black-and-white movies. We all did. Even me. But you can’t kill everything. It don’t work like that.”

“Why rosemary?” I asked.

“Rosemary’s for remembering,” his voice explained.

The butter-yellow moon was rising faster than I imagined or expected. Now it was a pale ghost-face in the sky, calm and compassionate, and white, bone-white.

The man said, “There’s always a chance that you could get out safely. Even on the night of the full moon. First you have to get to the center of the labyrinth. There’s a fountain there. You’ll see. You can’t mistake it. Then you have to make it back from the center. No missteps, no dead ends, no mistakes on the way in or on the way out. It’s probably easier now than it was when the bushes were high. It’s a chance. Otherwise, the labyrinth gets to cure you of all that ails you. Of course, you’ll have to run.”

I looked back. I could not see my guide. Not any longer. There was something in front of me, beyond the bush-path-pattern, a black shadow padding silently along the perimeter of the square. It was the size of a large dog, but it did not move like a dog.

It threw back its head and howled to the moon, with amusement and with merriment. The huge flat table at the top of the hill echoed with joyous howls, and, my left knee aching from the long hill climb, I stumbled forward.

The maze had a pattern; I could trace it. Above me, the moon shone, bright as day. She had always accepted my gifts in the past. She would not play me false at the end.

“Run,” said a voice that was almost a growl.

I ran like a lamb to his laughter.

Neil Gaiman
has been writing professionally for almost thirty years. He won the Newbery Medal and the Carnegie Medal and the Hugo Award for
The Graveyard Book
. He won no awards of any kind for
A Walking Tour of the Shambles
, his little book with Gene Wolfe, but is ridiculously proud of it anyway. He has three children, two dogs, and about half a million bees.

JOE HALDEMAN

On Gene Wolfe:
I first met Gene Wolfe in Damon Knight’s huge crumbling manse in Milford, Pennsylvania, in 1970. We were both “new writers” as far as science fiction was concerned, with only a few stories published, but Gene had been writing nonfiction for a long time.

With some chagrin I remember that both Damon and Kate Wilhelm considered Gene a fully formed genius, whereas I (almost a decade younger) was just a new kid on the block, maybe showing a little early promise. Gene was a pleasant, charming man, modest almost to the point of self-effacement, and so I had to like him even though we were rivals.

The rivalry faded quickly enough, and we were pretty good friends by the end of the week. Over the years and decades that followed, it’s become obvious that there is no sense in thinking of Gene in terms of rivalry, or even friendly competition. There is only one Gene Wolfe, and if he’s in a race there is no other writer on the track.

I
heard the sea, then voices. Not too close. Smelled the sea to the left, and then wood smoke from another direction. Blinked away crust and rubbed my eyes, and the green dapple became dense overhead foliage, restless in the breeze. I didn’t hurt, but my legs and arms were like heavy wood, and sunburned the color of mahogany. I couldn’t recall my name.

I have been here before. Not this place, but this condition. A name would come to me.

It shimmered and then came into focus: Christopher, or Ignacio.

Bearer of Christ or bearer of fire. Odd to know all that and not know where I am or what I am doing here.

Sensation crept into my limbs in a gradual sparkling, then cramps. My right hand throbbed. I could move my arms clumsily, and tried to make as little noise as possible while kneading life back into the muscles of my legs.

I got to my knees and staggered upright. I was wearing a gray homespun jerkin that smelled of sea and sweat. On my belt, a long knife or short sword in a scabbard of brass and leather. I drew it and inspected it.

A practical tool, perhaps piratical as well. Thick blade more than a foot long, double-edged several inches back from the point, and then saw-toothed on the tang.

I knew that word, tang, for the back of the blade. I even knew that the rainbow swirl meant the steel had been beaten to life in Seville. Folded over red-hot, pounded flat, and quenched, over and over. Where did I learn that?

Coins in a leather bag, mostly silver; two gold ones smaller than dimes. I couldn’t decipher the words stamped on them, nor recognize the cruel faces of their kings or gods.

A small pocket on the sheath held half a whetstone. I vaguely remembered breaking it in two, giving half to a man in chains.

I didn’t have my glasses but could see clearly, colors vivid even in this low light. Flexing, I realized my limbs were as young as my eyes. Eyes and limbs that yesterday were old.

Under the dirt, my hands were a young man’s, but with three long scars across the back of the right, one of them fresh. Not deep enough to sever the tendon, thank God.

He’d cut me as I stepped forward, thrusting. I took him just below the sternum, a clean kill. Were we on a ship?

“Put that thing away or prepare to use it.” A man had come quietly up behind me while I was studying the sword. He had a saber out but was ostentatiously leaning on it, like a rakish cane.

I slid the short blade into its scabbard and showed him my empty hands. “My toothpick would be no contest,” I said.

He sheathed his own sword. “ ‘Toothpick’? I get the meaning.” He removed his right glove and offered his hand. I took it and he squeezed once, hard. “You are here for the circle?”

“I don’t know. I just woke up. Or am I dreaming?”

“Always a good question,” he said. “Which of us ever knows? But I think we’re in the same dream right now.”

“Okay.” I gestured around. “But where is this dream?”

“They say Hispaniola. I haven’t been here an hour myself. Like you, I suppose, I woke up here and found the circle.” The sound of voices rose to argument level, behind him. “Be careful. I’ve seen one man die already.”

“People die in dreams,” I said.

“True, but do they stink? See for yourself.” He gestured and I walked past him to the sound of flies buzzing.

The body of a black man was at the base of an old tree, shirtless but with a white cap on his head.

Then I realized he wasn’t negro. A white man who had been dead long enough for his skin to turn livid. The “cap” was his skull, scalped. His abdomen had been opened with a long slice, and spilled. Arms spread in supplication—or was that rigor mortis? I had never seen a dead person except in funeral parlors.

He had been turned over, I knew somehow. It’s the side on the ground that darkens with pooled blood.

The wind shifted and the smell turned serious.

I covered my mouth and nose with a handkerchief, from somewhere. “What did he do?”

“It’s more what he didn’t do. He didn’t leave his sword in its scabbard. Then, having taken it out, he didn’t kill the man who challenged him . . . and then he didn’t parry the first blow properly. There was no second blow.”

“What if he hadn’t drawn his sword?”

He toed the man’s shoulder and flies buzzed away. “One never knows. The challenger had said something remarkable about his mother. I suppose he had to respond.”

I tried to think. “Hispaniola. So this is after 1492?”

“A century after. What time do you come from?”

“The twenty-first century. 2016.”

He nodded. “Two centuries after mine. What language are you speaking?”

Was he crazy? “En glish, like you.”

“In fact, I don’t know English. On this island, that apparently makes no difference.”

“But your mouth . . . your lips are speaking English.”

“And yours are speaking Swedish, to me. Like everybody else. But I’m the only Swede here.”