The Wildside Book of Fantasy: 20 Great Tales of Fantasy (39 page)

Vandibar Nasha and Lord Radaces both drew daggers, but no ordinary weapons. These were forged of that metal which only dragons may fetch from the cores of suns.

“Release us,” said Radaces. “Let us be what we once were.”

“Or else die,” said Vandibar Nasha.

Sekenre rippled like quicksilver and stood behind them. Both of them turned. He shook his head sadly. For just an instant, his expression was that of a little boy who has made a mess and is terribly sorry, but can’t do anything about it. Then his manner changed, and he seemed older, and he spoke without an accent.

“Once that single instant has passed in which you open yourself to sorcery, there is no going back. You cannot say that when this is all over you will resume your former life, because it will never be over.”

Vandibar, fingering his dagger, said, “But we are still apprentices. I’ve read that to truly become a sorcerer, you have to attend the College of Shadows, and there take a master, learn everything you can, and in the end, as a graduation exercise, you have to overcome and kill the master, thus becoming the other sorcerer.”

“Or else the master kills the student, and the result is much the same,” said Radaces.

“There is one difference,” said Sekenre. “The winner is the jar, containing the loser.”

“I understand further,” said Vandibar, “that I have been attending this college for a long time, that it is all around me, and has been ever since that first night in the garden. It is different for each individual sorcerer.”

“But we have not yet graduated,” said Radaces, holding his dagger in a firm, clenched fist. “I think it’s time we do.”

Sekenre merely shrugged and sat down on the bench again. He got out his book and pretended to ignore them.

Vandibar and Radaces both stepped forward.

“Then you must discover who your master is,” Sekenre said, not looking up as the two of them paused and glanced at one another uncertainly. “Each student may encounter any number of teachers, but he has only one master, whose heart and mind he comes to know as intimately as his own, with whom he shares the great majority of exercises, sparring, countering one another as both grow in sorcery. Don’t mistake the master for the attendant, who merely brings what is wanted and leads you to the places of learning.”

Then, heedless of them, Sekenre got out his pens and brushes and began writing on opposite pages the tales of Vandibar Nasha and of Lord Radaces, both sorcerers of great renown. But when he reached a certain point, he stopped, because he didn’t know how either story was to end.

Vandibar and Radaces stood by the edge of the empty pool. They wept, naming their wives and children long gone. They comforted each other as best they could, and then they looked into one another’s eyes, and each clenched his dagger firmly.

“It is death between us, old friend,” said Vandibar Nasha.

THE POWER OF PRAYER, by Brian Stableford

When the great plague arrived in the lush farmlands and market towns of Central Aquitania, forty years before its conquest by Charles the Great, panic swept downstream through the valley of the Dordogne even more rapidly than the disease itself.

Aquitania had then been a Catholic country for more than two centuries, although the descendants of Clovis were well enough aware of the fact that their ancestor’s conversion of his kingdom had been made for political reasons, in imitation of a stratagem once successfully employed by the Roman emperor Constantine. There were some among the Aquitanians, even at eight generations removed, who thought it unbecoming of conquerors to be so slavish in their imitation of the manners and pretensions of those they had conquered, and were therefore careful to maintain older beliefs and rituals alongside those of the Roman church.

“It was, after all, the Goths who triumphed over Constantine’s descendants,” the secret heretics argued. “Should the descendants of Clovis not be proud of their Gothic heritage?”

These proud men understood well enough that history was securely in the custody of the churchmen, but they were also prepared to be proud of their refusal to learn to write. For this reason, no matter what the churchmen recorded for the benefit of posterity, the great upsurge of religious sentiment and devotion provoked by the panic that came rushing down the Dordogne was by no means confined to the established churches.

This is not to say, of course, that the churches were not full, or that the convents did not enjoy a sudden influx of pious novices. Monasteries and nunneries alike doubled their personnel overnight, and their superiors were very glad to be so richly deluged with gifts and bequests. Alas, when the plague arrived, hot on the heels of the panic, the newly-repopulated convents and recently-swollen congregations of the riverside towns were as comprehensively decimated as the remote villages and hamlets where the habits of confession and communion had never becoming deeply entrenched.

Far upriver, in the foothills of what is nowadays called the Massif Central, there was then a small market town named Coramdram, which has long since vanished from the map. The people of Coramdram and its environs were sharply reminded, by more than a score of exceedingly ugly deaths, of the duties which they owed to all the gods who might protect them. Prayer was a duty that Coramdram’s Christians and pagans alike had been rather apt to neglect, but the Christians, at least, resumed it without suffering too many pangs of conscience; human vanity is ever-ready to assume that a good God will always be on hand, patiently awaiting the attention of His followers during those intervals when other occupations seem far more important.

Perhaps the Christians were correct in this assumption, and the streets of Coramdram would have been profusely littered with rotting corpses had the Lord not extended His mercy to a reasonable extent—but people rarely count their misfortunes accurately, nor do they often agree on the final sum. Those who consider that they have endured far more than their fair share of disaster are outnumbered only by those who think that their neighbors have had far more than a just allotment of good luck. The moral arithmetic of human existence is always inclined to overestimate an individual’s own immediate aches and pains, while refusing to acknowledge all but the most fatal afflictions of others. Perhaps it is this imperfection in the artistry of calculation that is responsible for the continued popularity of deities whom Christians deem far less worthy of worship than their own jealous God.

At any rate, there were some in Coramdram—as there invariably were in those days, whenever the Visitor of Plague and Pestilence set his footprint upon a recently-Christianized region—who preferred to address their placatory prayers to the gods that had been theirs for hundreds of generations rather than a mere eight.

In the opinion of the church’s historians, these heretics were addressing the plague-demon’s immediate superior, Satan, instead of the Lord who had cast that fallen angel into the depths—but that was not the way the unrepentant followers of Gothic tradition saw their own situation. In their eyes, the author of the disaster was merely one god among a company of equals, none of whom was any better or worse disposed towards humanity than the rest.

Why should one pray to a good God for protection, the pagans’ reasoning went, when even a blind man could clearly see that evil was a more powerful force than good in the world of men? What good could it do to beg Jesus Christ and the martyred saints to provide a shield against disease, given that not one of them had been able to defend himself or herself against the direst misfortune? Was it not more sensible to cut out all mediators and go straight to the source of the trouble? Was it not more reasonable, instead of asking that an entire street, or a whole town, or even a region should be spared, to pray instead that the disease would strike down everyone except for one’s own immediate family? Surely, the pagans thought, the god of plague and pestilence must be grateful for such prayers, given that they offered a welcome endorsement to his overall strategy—which was always to spare a few while killing the many, in order that he might find each of his old haunts deliciously repopulated whenever he chanced to pass that way again.

One of the careful folk who assessed the situation in these terms was Ophiria, wife of the ruddy-faced harness-maker Remy Brousse, Indeed, Ophiria went even further than others whose philosophy ran along the same lines, because she did not trouble to accommodate Remy in her prayers for salvation. Quite the reverse: the advent of the plague seemed to her to offer a welcome chance of deliverance from a marriage which had come to seem unbearably tedious. When she offered up her secret prayers to the god of pestilence, therefore, she took care to include Remy in the list of names of those she would most like to see breaking out in horrible spots, seething with fever, streaming mucus from every orifice and writhing in hideous agony.

Ophiria’s list was quite long, because Coramdram was the kind of town in which everybody—even those who were scornfully excluded from the best gossiping-circles—knew everybody else’s name. Because she was a scrupulous person, she never allowed herself the luxury of any casual omission or forgetful abbreviation. On the other hand, by way of ameliorating what some of her neighbors might think unwarranted malice, she never specifically mentioned buboes among the afflictions she wished upon her more distant acquaintances.

Even Ophiria’s closest acquaintances—none of whom was sufficiently close as to think of her as a friend—would have been surprised to discover the extent of her disaffection from her husband. Remy Brousse was not cruel or quarrelsome, nor was he given to adulterous liaisons. By the standards of the region at the head of the Dordogne valley, that was sufficient to make him an unusually good and devoted husband. His only marital crime, if crime it could be reckoned, was to have allowed himself to become extremely fat and rather indolent.

There were corpulent wives in Coramdram who would not have reckoned the former item as an unforgivable sin, but Ophiria had remained as slender throughout their marriage as the day she was wed, when her late mother-in-law had been unkind enough to judge her unpromisingly thin. An indolent husband is always reckoned undesirable even by an indolent wife, but Ophiria was far more energetic than the average—perhaps surprisingly so, for one of her meager dimensions. Had she borne her husband any children she might have lost her energy as well as her trim figure, but the marriage was barren.

Remy Brousse was a popular man in the district in spite of his indolence, because he was very ingenious with his hands. Although he did not like to work hard he did take considerable delight in working cleverly; he took as much pride in the ease with which he accomplished a task as in the perfection of the result.

“It is the glory and privilege of mindful beings,” Remy often told his clients, “that we may accomplish our ends without breaking our backs or sweating away our bodily mass.” This saying was repeated far and wide along the Dordogne—perhaps even as far as Bordeaux—in a relatively good-humored manner.

Remy had another saying too, which had an equal bearing on his popularity, which was: “Necessity is the mother of improvisation.” He said this because he was not a man to walk far in search of conventional materials when there was something close to hand that could be pressed into service. In a region where leather was reckoned expensive, he was always able—and perfectly willing—to make harnesses for poorer folk from rope, or cord, or anything else which came conveniently to hand.

Alas, this virtue, like his others, went unappreciated by Remy Brousse’s bitter spouse, who had an instinctive dislike of any object or instrument that had not been formed from its proper material, according to its proper pattern.

At the time when the great plague came to Coramdram the Brousses had been married for nineteen years. Ophiria, having recently passed her thirty-fourth birthday, felt that old age had not yet marked her irredeemably, but knew that cruel time would not leave her unmolested for many years longer. She knew, too, that if she were to obtain a second husband more to her taste, she would need better bait than her narrow face. Given that her husband’s shop would make a very attractive marriage-portion for an ambitious leather-worker, she felt that her own necessity required a certain amount of improvisation. This factor also entered into the equation whose solution was expressed in her devout prayers to the god of plague and pestilence, causing her not merely to mention Remy’s name in her prayers but to give special prominence to it.

“Please, please,
please
take my husband Remy, even if you take no one else I have identified as a suitable sacrifice,” Ophiria would say, whenever she reached the end of her exhaustive list. “He has become useless and burdensome to me, but he would make a fine and fleshy morsel for one such as you—and it is surely the glory and privilege of divinity that a god such as yourself may accomplish your ends without bending your back or shedding a single bead of sweat.”

The church’s historians would dispute the identity of the being which responded to this prayer, but whether it was a member in good standing of a pantheon of peers or merely one of Satan’s imps, it did as it was asked. Remy Brousse fell dreadfully ill with the plague.

First the unfortunate harness-maker broke out in horrible spots, which turned into hot sores that drove him mad with their unquenchable itching. Then he developed a seething fever, which exported acrid moisture from his shriveling flesh by the gallon. His every orifice began to drip mucus—most of it grey-green in color, except when it was mingled with blood, when it became blue-black. All the while he writhed in hideous agony. The only mercy was that his armpits and groin remained free of buboes—but even that, in the end, only served to prolong his suffering for a day or two longer than was strictly necessary.

While she watched the corpulent body of her husband fade gradually away, as if the flesh were melting from his bones—which observation she was careful to make from a safe distance—Ophiria took some trouble to pose as a devoted Christian widow-to-be. There were several reasons for this precaution, of which the first and foremost was that worshippers of a god of pestilence need to be even more secretive than usual in a time of plague. Ophiria had always been suspected by her neighbors of being the sort of person who might pray to a dubious god, and there was not a man or woman in Coramdram who would not have been glad of a scapegoat upon whom they could vent their righteous anger against the ravages of the disease. Supplementary to that fundamental caution, however, was Ophiria’s knowledge that if she hoped to obtain a new and better husband, she had to advertise herself—much more carefully than she had contrived to do heretofore—as a devoted and loyal wife. For these reasons, she set herself to outdo her neighbors in her public displays of grief, although this was not an easy thing to do when there was not a family in the district that had not suffered its own grievous losses.

Perhaps, in addition to these practical considerations, Ophiria actually began to feel slight stings of guilt and remorse while her husband came nearer and nearer to his end. It is, after all, never pleasant to observe—even from a respectful distance—the many ways in which disease and decay can maltreat a man. If so, her improvisations of grief might have contained at least a tiny measure of necessity.

When the death-cart paused outside the door of Remy Brousse’s harness-shop, so that his body might be collected and ferried to the hastily-dug and abruptly-consecrated pit that was to serve as a collective grave for all Coramdram’s plague-victims, Ophiria commenced to make loud protestations against the unkindness of the cruel demon who had robbed her of all that she held dear in the world. When the cart pulled away again she followed it through the streets, weeping and wailing in a prodigious manner.

Because the pit had been dug on the far side of the town, and because the route that the death-cart followed through the streets was so circuitous, Ophiria had to walk for miles, but she never faltered in her keening. She was joined in due course by other wives, and by mothers and grandmothers too, but the competition they provided only spurred her on to greater efforts.

Hundreds of people—almost every one of whom was named on her secret list—saw Ophiria following Remy Brousse’s body. If they were surprised by the fact that a woman as thin as she could cry so effusively, they only had to remind themselves that she had always been an uncommonly energetic woman. Even the most snobbish and scornful among them must have felt a pang of sympathy as they saw how badly she had reacted to her loss.

“Perhaps, after all,” a few good Christians whispered to their neighbors, “Ophiria Brousse was not as unloving as she sometimes seemed. Perhaps she was one of those unhappy souls who are incapable of giving voice to their true feelings until the worst comes to the worst, and then must endure in a few desperate hours the irresistible flood of emotions pent up for years.”