The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (14 page)

I left the old woman where she lay, and I took her treasure with me, her little Bic. I walked another day, and then a truck came by and picked me up and took me to the next big town. I found a bank, and had no difficulty storing my monies away in it. There I learned what I had lost when I put the sexy-card back in the cave wall, for the bank-man gave me just such a one, only plainer. The card was the key to my money, he said. I should show the card to whoever was selling to me, and through the magic of computers the money would flow straight out of the bank to that person, without me having to touch it.

“Where is a good hotel?” I asked him, when we were done. “And where can I find good shopping, like Armani and Rolex?” These names I had heard argued over, as we crouched in foxholes and behind walls waiting for orders; I had seen them in the boss-magazines, between the pages of the women some men tortured themselves with wanting, during the many boredoms of the army.

The bank-man came out with me onto the street and waved me up a taxi. I didn’t even have to tell the driver where to go. I sat in the back seat and smiled at my good fortune. The driver eyed me in the mirror.

“Watch the road,” I said. “You’ll be in big trouble if I get hurt.”

“Sir,” he said.

At the hotel I found that I was already vouched for; the bank had telephoned them to say I was coming and to treat me well.

“First,” I said, “I will have a hot bath, a meal, and some hours’ sleep. I’ve traveled a long way. Then I will need clothes, and this uniform to be burned. And introductions. Other rich men. Rich women, too; beautiful women. I’m sure you know the kind of thing I mean.”

When I was stuffing my pack full of dollars underground, I could not imagine ever finding a use for so much money. But then began my new life. A long, bright dream, it was, of laughing friends, and devil women in their devil clothes, and wonderful drugs, and new objects and belongings conjured by money as if by wizardry, and I enjoyed it all and thoroughly. Money lifts and floats you, above cold weather and hunger and war, above filth, above having to think and plan—if any problem comes at you, you throw a little money at it and it is gone, and everyone smiles and bows and thanks you for your patronage.

That is, until your plastic dies.
Then
I understood truly what treasure I’d rejected when I left that card in the third cave. There was no more money behind my card; that other card, with the near-naked woman on it, behind
that
had been an endless supply;
that
card would never have died. I had to sell my apartment and rent a cheaper place. Piece by piece I sold all the ornaments and furniture I’d accumulated, to pay my rent. But even the worth of those expensive objects ran out, and I let the electricity and the gas go, and then I found myself paying my last purseful for a month’s rent in not much more than an attic, and scrounging for food.

I sat one night on the floor at my attic window, hungry and glum, with no work but herding and soldiering to turn my fortunes around with. I went through my last things, my last belongings left in a nylon backpack too shabby to sell. I pulled out an envelope, with a crest on it, of a hotel—ah, it was those scraps from the first day I had come to this town, with all my money in my pack. These were the bits and pieces that the chamber-boy had saved from the pockets of my soldiering-clothes.
Shall I throw these away, sir?
he’d said to me.
No,
I told him.
Keep them to remind me how little I had before today. How my fortunes changed.

“Ha!” I laid the half-spliff on my knee. A grain fell out of the tip. That had been a good spliff, I remembered, well-laced with the fighting-powder that made you a hero, that took away all your fear.

“And you!” I took out the pink lighter, still fingerprinted with the mud of that blasted countryside.

“Ha!” One last half-spliff would make this all bearable. A few hours, I would have, when nothing mattered, not this house, not this hunger, not my own uselessness and the stains on my memory from what I had done as a rich man, and before that as a soldier. And then, once it was done . . . Well, I would just have to beggar and burgle my way home, wouldn’t I, and take up with the goats again. But why think of that now? I scooped the grain back into the spliff and twisted the end closed. I flicked the lighter.

Some huge thing, rough, scabby, crushed me to the wall. I gasped a breath of sweet-rotten air and near fainted. Then the thing adjusted itself, and I was free, and could see, and it was that great gray spindly dog from the underground cave, turning and turning on himself in the tiny space of my attic, sweeping the beams of his red movie-disc eyes about, at me, at my fate and circumstances.

I stared at the lighter in my hand. A long, realizing sound came out of me. So the lighter was the key to the dogs! You flicked it, they came. And see how he lowered his head and his tail in front of me, and looked away from my stare. He was mine, in my power! I didn’t need some old apron-of-a-witch to wrap him in and tame him.

Sweat prickled out on me, cold. I’d nearly left this Bic with the old biddy, in her dead hand, for a joke! Some other soldier, some civilian scavenger, some child, might have picked it up and got this power! I’d been going to fling it far out into the mud-land around us, just to laugh while she scrabbled after it. I’d been going to walk away laughing, my pack stuffed with the money I’d brought up from below, and the old girl with nothing.

I looked around the red-lit attic, and out the window at the patched and crowded roofs across the way, dimming with evening. I need never shiver here again; I need never see these broken chimneys or these bent antennae. Now I
enjoyed
the tweaking of the hunger pangs in my belly, because I was about to banish them forever, just as soon as I summoned that hot golden dog with his never-dying money-card.

I clicked the lighter three times.

And so it all began again, the dream, the floating, the powders and good weed, the friends. They laughed again at my stories of how I had come here from such a nowhere. For a time there my family and our goats had lost their fascination, but now they enthralled these prosperous people again, as travelers’ tales had once bewitched me around the home fires.

I catch the queen by the shoulders. One of her men dives for his gun. I shoot him; his eye spouts; he falls dead. The queen gives a tiny shriek.

I heard about the princess from the man who fitted out my yacht. He had just come from the tricky job of making lounges for the girl’s prison tower, which was all circular rooms.

“Prison?” I said. “The king keeps his daughter in a prison?”

“You haven’t heard of this?” He laughed. “He keeps her under lock and key, always has. He’s a funny chap. He had her stars done, her chart or whatever, right when she was born, and the chart said she’d marry a soldier. So he keeps her locked up so’s this soldier won’t get to her. She only meets people her parents choose.”

Oh, does she?
I thought, even as I laughed and shook my head with the yacht-man.

That night when I was alone and had smoked a spliff, I had the golden dog bring her. She arrived asleep, his back a broad bed for her, his fire damped down for her comfort. He laid the girl on the couch nearest the fire.

She curled up there, belonging as I’ve never belonged in these apartments, delicate, royal, at peace. She was like a carved thing I’d just purchased, a figurine. She was beautiful, certainly, but not effortfully so, as were most women I had met since I came into my wealth. It was hard to say how much of her beauty came from the fact that I knew she was a princess; her royalty seemed to glow in her skin, to be woven into her clothing, every stitch and seam of it considered and made fit. Her little foot, out the bottom of the nightdress, was the neatest, palest, least walked-upon foot I had ever seen since the newborn feet of my brothers and sisters. It was a foot meant for an entirely different purpose from my own, from most feet of the world.

Even in my new, clean clothes, like a man’s in a magazine, I felt myself to be filth crouched beside this creature. These hands had done work, these eyes had seen things that she could never conceive of; this memory was a rubbish-heap of horrors and indignities. It was one thing to be rich; it was quite another to be born into it, to be royal from a long line of royalty, to have never lived anything but the palace life.

The princess woke with the tiniest of starts. Up and back from me she sat, and she took in the room, and me.

Have you kidnapped me?
she said, and swallowed a laugh.

Look at your eyes,
I said, but her whole face was the thing, bright awake, and curious, and not disgusted by me.

Perhaps your name?
she said gently. Her nightwear was modest in covering her neck-to-ankle, but warmth rushed through me to see her breasts so clearly outlined inside the thin cloth.

I made myself meet her eyes.
Can I serve you somehow? Are you hungry? Thirsty?

How can I be?
said the princess, and blinked.
I am asleep and dreaming. Or stoned. It smells very strongly of weed in here. Where was I before?

I brought a tray of pretty foods from the feast the golden dog had readied. I sat beside her and poured us both some of the cordial. I handed it to her in the frail stemmed glass, raised mine to her and drank.

I shouldn’t touch it,
she whispered.
I am in a story; it will put me under some spell.

Then I am magicked too,
I said, and raised again the glass I’d sipped from, pretending to be alarmed that half was gone.

She laughed, a small sweet sound—she had very well-kept teeth, just like the magazine women, the poster-women—then she drank.

Now, tell me, what is all this?
I said of the tray.
These little things here—they must be fruit by their shape, no? But why are they so small?

She ate one, and it clearly pleased her.
Who is your chef?
she said, with a kind of frown of pleasure.

He is a secret,
I said, for I could hardly tell her that a dog had made this feast.

Of course.
She took another of the little fruits, and ate it, and held her fingers ready to lick, a delicate spread fan.

She touched her fingers to a napkin, then put the tray aside. She knelt beside me, and leaned through the perfume of herself, which was light and clean and spoke only quietly of her wealth.
Who are you?
she said, and she put her lips to mine, and held them there a little, her eyes closing, then opening surprised.
Do you not
want
to kiss me?

I sit with my fellows in the briefing-room at the barracks. Up on the movie screen, foreign actors are locked together by their lips. Boss-soldiers groan and hoot in the seats in front of us. We giggle at the screen and at the men. “And they call
us
‘tribals,’
”
says my friend Kadir who later will be blown to pieces before my eyes. “Look at how wild they are, what animals! They cannot control themselves.”

The princess was poised to be dismayed or embarrassed.
Oh, I do want to,
I said,
but how is it done?
For, except for my mother in my childhood, I had never kissed a woman—even here in my rich-man life—in a way that was not somehow a violence upon her.

So handsome, and you don’t already know?
But she taught me. She was gentle, but forceful; she pressed herself to me, pushed me (with her little weight!) down onto the couch cushions. I was embarrassed that she must feel my desire, but she did not seem to mind, or perhaps she did not know enough to notice. She crushed her breasts against me, her belly and thighs. And the kissing—I had to breathe through my nose, for she would not stop, and there was no room for my breath with all her little lively tongue, and her hair falling and sliding everywhere, and eventually I dared to put my hands to her rounded bottom and pull her harder against me, and closed my eyes against the consequences.

Hush,
she said over me at one point, rising off me, her hair making a slithering tent around our heads and shoulders, all dark gold. Her breasts hung forward in the elaborate frontage of the nightgown—I was astonished by their closeness; I covered them with my hands in a kind of swoon.

I told her what I was, in the night, over some more of that beautiful insubstantial food. I told her about the old woman, and the dogs; I showed her the Bic.
That is all I am,
I said.
Lucky. Lucky to have lived, lucky to have come into this fortune, lucky to have you before me. I am not noble and I have no right to anything.

Oh,
she said,
but it is all luck, don’t you see?
And she knelt up and held my face as a child does, to make you listen.
My own family’s wealth, it came about from the favors of one king and one bishop, back in the fourteenth century. You learn all the other, all the speaking and manners and how to behave with people lower than yourself; it can be learned by goatherds and by soldiers just as it can by the farmers my family once were, the loyal servants.

She kissed me.
Certainly you look noble,
she whispered and smiled.
You are my prince, be sure of that.

She dazzled me with what she was, and had, and said, and what she was free from knowing. But I would have loved her just for her body and its closeness, how pale she was, and soft, and intact, and for her face, perfect above that perfection, gazing on me enchanted. She was like the foods she fancied, beautiful nothingness, a froth of luxury above the hard, real business of the world, which was the machinery of war and missiles, the flying darts and the blown dust and smoke, the shudder in your guts as the bosses brought in the air support, and saved you yet again from becoming a thing like these others, pieces of bleeding litter tossed aside from the action, their part in the game ended.