Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show (14 page)

The cold iron tip of his arrow only nicked my arm. Though the wound was slight, still the iron dispelled my charms, and I suddenly found myself standing before him naked (for I had no need of clothes). My heart pounded in terror and desire.

I suddenly imagined what the boy would do, having seen me. I imagined his lips against mine, and his hands pressing firmly into my buttocks, and that he would ravish me. After all, night after night my mother had warned me what men would do if they saw me.

So I anticipated his advances. In fact, in that moment I imagined that I might actually be in love, and so determined that I would endure his passion if not enjoy it.

But to my dismay, when he saw me suddenly standing there naked, he merely fainted. Though I tried to revive him for nearly an hour, each time I did so, he gazed at me in awe and then passed out again.

When night came, I wrapped myself in a cloak of invisibility and let him regain his wits. Then I followed him to his home at the edge of a village. He kept listening for me, and he begged me not to follow, thinking me a succubus or some other demon.

He made the sign of the cross against me, and I begged him to tarry. But he shot arrows at me and seemed so frightened that I dared not follow him farther, for his sake as well as mine.

Soon thereafter I met Wiglan, the wise woman of the barrow. She was a lumpy old thing, almost like a tree trunk with arms. She had been dead for four hundred years, and still her spirit had not flickered out and faded, as so many do, but instead had ripened into something warped and strange and eerie. Moreover, she did not grow forgetful during the days as my mother’s shade did, and so she offered me a more even level of companionship.

One night under the bright eternal stars, I told Wiglan of my problem, of how my mother longed for me to look mortal, and how I now longed for it, too. I could no longer take comfort in the company of cold shades or in conversations with animals. I craved the touch of real flesh against mine, the kiss of warm lips, the touch of hands, and the thrust of hips.

“Perhaps,” Wiglan said, “you should seek out the healing pools up north. If the goddess can heal you at all, there is where you will find her blessing.”

“What pools?” I asked, heart pounding with a hope that I had never felt so keenly before.

“There are ancient pools in Wales,” she said, “called the Maiden’s Fount. While I yet lived, the Romans built a city there, called Caerleon. I heard that they enclosed the fount and built a temple to their goddess Minerva. The fount has great powers, and the Romans honored the goddess in their way, but even then it was a sin, for in honoring the goddess, they sought to hedge her in.”

“That was hundreds of years ago,” I said. “Are you sure that the fount still springs forth?”

“It is a sacred place to the Lady and all of her kin,” Wiglan said. “It will still be there. Go by the light of a horned moon and ask of her what you will. Make an offering of water lilies and lavender. Perhaps your petition will be granted.”

Bursting with hope, I set off at once. I set my course by the River or Stars, and journeyed for many days over fields and hills, through dank forest and over the fetid bogs. At night I would sometimes seek directions from the dead, who were plentiful in those days of unrest, until at last after many weeks I reached the derelict temple.

The Saxons had been to Caerleon and burned the city a few years before. A castle stood not far from the ancient temple, but the villages around Caerleon had been burned and looted, their citizens murdered. Little remained of it, and for the moment the castle was staffed by a handful of soldiers who huddled on its walls in fear.

The temple on the hills above the fortress was in worse condition than was the castle. Some of the temple’s pillars had been knocked down, and moon disks above its facade lay broken and in ruins. Perhaps the Saxons had sensed the Lady’s power here and sought to put an end to it, or at least sully it.

The pools were overgrown and reedy, while owls hooted and flew on silent wings among the few standing pillars.

There I took my offerings and went to bathe under the crescent moon.

I knelt in the damp mud above the warm pool, cast out a handful of lavender into the brackish water, and stood with a white water lily cupped in my left palm. I whispered my prayers to the goddess, thanking her for the gifts that the Earth gave me, for her breasts that were hills, for the fruit of the fields and of the forest. I pleaded with her and named my desire before making my final offering of lily.

As I prayed, a man’s voice spoke up behind me. “She’s not that strong anymore. The new god is gaining power over this land, and the Great Mother hides. You seek a powerful magic, one that will change the very essence of what you are—and that is beyond her power. Perhaps you should seek a smaller blessing, ask her to do something easy, like change the future? Still, pray to her as you will. It hurts nothing, and I’m glad that some still talk to her.”

I turned and looked into the ice-pale eyes of a Welshman—and recognized at once my features in his face. He was my father. I did not feel surprised to meet him here. After all, my mother had taught me well that demons always seek out and torment their own children.

He stared right at me, his eyes caressing my naked flesh, even though I had been walking invisible.

“Sir Jordans?” I asked. “Or do you have a truer name?”

The fellow smiled wistfully and drew back his hood so that I could see his silvered hair in the moonlight. “I called myself that—but only once. How is your mother? Well, I hope.”

“Dead,” I answered, then waited in the cold silence for him to show some reaction.

When he saw that he must speak, he finally said, “Well, that happens.”

I demanded, “By the Bright Lady, what is your name?” I do not know if the goddess forced him to reveal it because we were at the pool, or if he would have told me anyway, but he answered.

“Merlin. Some call me Merlin the Prophet, or Merlin the Seer. Others name me a Magician.”

“Not Merlin the Procurer? Not Merlin the Seducer? Not Merlin the Merciless?”

“What I did, I did only once,” Merlin said, as if that should buy a measure of forgiveness. “The omens were good that night, for one who wished to produce offspring strong in the old powers. It was the first horned moon of the new summer, after all.”

“Is that the only reason you took my mother, because the moon was right?”

“I was not at Tintagel on my own errand,” Merlin defended himself. “Uther Pendragon wanted to bed the Duchess Igraine, and he would have killed her husband for the chance. Call me a procurer if you will, but I tried only to save the duke’s life—and I foresaw in the process that Pendragon’s loins would produce a son who could be a truer and greater king than Uther could ever be.”

“Igraine’s son? You did not kill the boy?”

“No, Arthur lives with me now, and follows me in my travels. In a year or two, he will learn his destiny,” Merlin said. “He will unite all of England and drive back the Saxons, and he will rule this stubborn realm with a gentle hand…” He hunched in the tall grass beside the pool, staring thoughtfully into water that reflected moon and stars.

“So you helped seduce the Lady Igraine for a noble cause. But why did you bed my mother?”

“For you!” Merlin said in surprise, as if it were obvious. “I saw that night that your mother had fey blood, and all of the omens were right. I saw that you would be wise and beautiful, and the thought came to me that Arthur would need a fair maiden by his side. The old blood is strong in you, both from me and your mother. If you marry Arthur Pendragon, perhaps together we can build a realm where the old gods are worshipped beside the new.”

“Didn’t you think before you mounted her?” I asked. “Didn’t you think about how it would destroy her?”

Merlin said, “I looked down the path of her future. She would have married a stableboy and borne him five fine sons and a brace of daughters. She would have been happier, perhaps—but she would not have had you!”

“My mother died in torment because of you!” I shouted. “She died alone in the woods, because she feared letting anyone see me alive. She died friendless, because I was too young and silly to know how to save her. Her spirit is in torment still!”

“Yes, yes,” Merlin cajoled as if I did not quite see some greater point, “I’m sure it all seems a tragedy. But you are here, are you not? You—”

I saw then that he would not listen, that my mother’s suffering, her loneliness and shame, all meant nothing to him. She was but a pawn in his hand, a piece to be sacrificed for the sake of some greater game.

I knew then that I hated him, and that I could never allow Merlin to use his powers against a woman this way again. And suddenly I glanced up at a shooting star, and I knew that I had the power, that the old blood was strong enough in me, that I could stop him.

“Father,” I interrupted him, holding the lily high in my left hand. Merlin shut his mouth. “In the name of the Bright Lady I curse you: Though you shall love a woman fiercely, the greater your desire for her grows, the more lame shall be your groin. Never shall you sire a child again. Never shall you use a woman as your pawn, or your seed as a tool.”

I stepped through the rushes to the side of the warm pool at Minerva’s failing temple, felt the living power of the goddess there as my toe touched the water.

“No!” Merlin shouted and raised his hand with little finger and thumb splayed in a horn as he tried to ward off my spell.

But either he was too late or the spell was too strong for him. In any case, I tossed the white lily into the still waters.

As the wavelets rolled away from the lily, bouncing against the edges of the pool, Merlin screamed in agony and put his hands over his face.

I believe that he was peering into his own bleak future as he cried in horror, “No! No! No!”

I knelt and dipped my hand in the pool seven times, cupping the water and letting it run down my breasts and between my legs.

Then I stood and merely walked away.

Sometimes near dawn, I waken and think that I can still hear Merlin’s cries ringing in my ears. I listen then, and smile a fey smile.

In time I made it back to my cottage in the woods, and I told the shade of my mother about all that had transpired. She seemed more at peace that night than ever before, and so before daybreak, I introduced her to the child Daffyth once again.

I told Daffyth that she was his mother, and convinced my mother’s shade that Daffyth was a forgotten son, born from her love for a man named Andelin.

In the still night I coaxed them to the edge of the woods, and let them go.

When last I saw them, they were walking hand in hand on the road to Tintagel.

As for me, I learned in time to praise the goddess for her goodness and for what I am and always hope to be—a mooncalfe, and no sorcerer’s pawn.

Afterword by David Farland

One day I happened to pick up a book on “extinct” English words, in which a linguist discussed words that had fallen out of use in our language. One of those words was “mooncalfe,” and the other was “bone fire,” and as I was reading, a brief image flashed through my mind of a young woman sending her prayers to heaven upon the smoke that rose from burning bones. I knew that she was a mooncalfe, and that she was twisted—but twisted in a way that left her with the unearthly beauty of a Faery on the outside and an unquenchable rage on the inside.

At the time, I was thinking about some of the moral ambiguity in Arthurian legend. Arthur’s tale is, without a doubt, a classic “fairy tale,” in the sense that it was a cautionary tale devised to show good Christians the folly of becoming involved with fairies or taking their gifts.

As we look at it today, we imagine that when Arthur pulls Excalibur from the stone, it is a great accomplishment. But a thousand years ago, our ancestors would have known that no good could come from such an unnatural thing. You can’t go about consorting with wizards and fairies and hope to come to a happy end. You can’t go about hoping to be more than what you are.

So when Arthur pulls the sword from the stone, it is the beginning of his downfall, and we are left to watch him through the rest of his tale—a young Christian with a heart of gold—doggedly treading the road to ruin.

Of course, over time, I’m sure, as Celtic beliefs were forgotten, the story changed. Arthur became a beloved hero, and Merlin was said to be a “prophet” and was twisted in such a way that Disney was able to show him as a harmless old tutor who only happened to have vast magical powers.

But I’ve always been bothered by that disturbing genesis of Arthur’s story—where Merlin uses his shape-changing abilities to help an evil king rape a good man’s wife.

And as the tale progresses, we see that no good can come from Merlin’s actions.

I’ve often thought that it would be fun to rewrite the Arthur story in such a way that the modern audience would experience the sense of horror that it was meant to evoke. “The Mooncalfe,” I suppose, would be the first chapter of that story.

Han Tzu
was the bright and shining hope of his family. He wore a monitor embedded in the back of his skull, near the top of his spine. Once, when he was very little, his father held him between mirrors in the bathroom. He saw that a little red light glowed there. He asked his father why he had a light on him when he had never seen another child with a light.

“Because you’re important,” said Father. “You will bring our family back to the position that was taken from us many years ago by the Communists.”

Tzu was not sure how a little red light on his neck would raise his family up. Nor did he know what a Communist was. But he remembered the words, and when he learned to read, he tried to find stories about Communists or about the family Han or about children with little red lights. There were none to be found.

His father played with him several times a day. He grew up with his father’s loving hands caressing him, cuffing him playfully; he grew up with his father’s smile. His father praised him whenever he learned something; it became Tzu’s endeavor every day to learn something so he could tell Father.

“You spell my name Tzu,” said Tzu, “even though it’s pronounced just like the word ‘zi.’ T-Z-U is the old way of spelling, called…‘Wade-Giles.’ The new way is ‘pinyin.’”

“Very good, my Tzu, my Little Master,” said Father.

“There’s another way of writing even older than
that,
where each word has its own letter. It was very hard to learn and even harder to put on computer so the government changed all the books to pinyin.”

“You are a brilliant little boy,” said Father.

“So now people give their children names spelled the old Wade-Giles way because they don’t want to let go of the lost glories of ancient China.”

Father stopped smiling. “Who told you that?”

“It was in the book,” said Tzu. He was worried that somehow he had disappointed Father.

“Well, it’s true. China has lost its glory. But someday it will have that glory back and all the world will see that we are still the Middle Kingdom. And do you know who will bring that glory back to China?”

“Who, Father?”

“My son, my Little Master, Han Tzu.”

“Where did China’s glory go, so I can bring it back?”

“China was the center of the world,” said Father. “We invented everything. All the barbarian kingdoms around China stole our ideas and turned them into terrible weapons. We left them in peace, but they would not leave
us
in peace, so they came and broke the power of the emperors. But still the Chinese resisted. Our glorious ancestor, Yuan Shikai, was the greatest general in the last age of the emperors.

“The emperors were weak, and the revolutionaries were strong. Yuan Shikai could see that weak emperors could not protect China. So he took control of the government. He pretended to agree with the revolutionaries of Sun Yat-sen, but then destroyed them and seized the imperial throne. He started a new dynasty, but then he was poisoned by traitors and died, just as the Japanese invaded.

“The Chinese people were punished for the death of Yuan Shikai. First the Japanese invaded China and many died. Then the Communists took over the government and ruled as evil emperors for a hundred years, growing rich from the slavery of the Chinese people. Oh how they yearned for the day of Yuan Shikai! Oh how they wished he had not been slain before he could unite China against the barbarians and the oppressors!”

There was a light in Father’s eyes that made Tzu a little afraid and yet also very excited. “Why would they poison him if our glorious ancestor was so good for China?” he asked.

“Because they wanted China to fail,” said Father. “They wanted China to be weak among the nations. They wanted China to be ruled by America and Russia, by India and Japan. But China always swallows up the barbarians and rises again, triumphant over all. Don’t you forget that.” Father tapped Tzu’s temples. “The hope of China is in
there.
”

“In my head?”

“To do what Yuan Shikai did, you must first become a great general.
That’s
why you have that monitor on the back of your neck.”

Tzu touched the little black box. “Do great generals all have these?”

“You are being watched. This monitor will protect you and keep you safe. I made sure you had the perfect mama to make you very, very smart. Someday they’ll give you tests. They’ll see that the blood of Yuan Shikai runs true in your veins.”

“Where’s Mama?” asked Tzu, who at that age had no idea of what “tests” were or why someone else’s blood would be in his veins.

“She’s at the university, of course, doing all the smart things she does. Your mother is one of the reasons that our city of Nanyang and our province of Henan are now leaders in Chinese manufacturing.”

Tzu had heard of manufacturing. “Does she make cars?”

“Your mother invented the process that allows almost half of the light of the sun to be converted directly to electricity. That’s why the air in Nanyang is always clean and our cars sell better than any others in the world.”

“Then Mama should be emperor!” said Tzu.

“But your father is very important, too,” said Father. “Because I worked hard when I was young, and I made a lot of money, and I used that money to pay for her research when nobody else thought it would lead to anything.”

“Then
you
be emperor,” said Tzu.

“I am one of the richest men in China,” said Father, “certainly the richest in Henan province. But being rich is not enough to be emperor. Neither is being smart. Though from your mother and me, you will grow up to be both.”

“What does it take to be emperor?”

“You must crush all your enemies and win the love and obedience of the people.”

Tzu made a fist with his hand, as tight and strong a fist as he could. “I can crush bugs,” he said. “I crushed a beetle once.”

“You’re very strong,” said Father. “I’m proud of you all the time.”

Tzu got to his feet and went around the garden looking for things to crush. He tried a stone, but it wasn’t crushable. He broke a twig, but when he tried to crush the pieces, it hurt his hand. He crushed a worm and it made his hands smeary with ichor. The worm was dead. What good was a crushed worm? What was an enemy? Would it look like this when he crushed one?

He hoped his enemies were softer than stone. He couldn’t crush stones at all. But it was messy and unpleasant to crush worms, too. It was much more fun to let them crawl across his hand.

Tutors began to come to the house. None of them played with him for very long at a time, and each one had his own kind of games. Some of them were fun, and Tzu was very good at many of them. Children were also brought to him, boys who liked to wrestle and race, girls who wanted to play with dolls and dress up in adult clothing. “I don’t like to play with girls so much,” said Tzu to his father, but Father only answered, “You must know all kinds of people when you rule over them someday. Girls will show you what to care about. Boys will show you how to win.”

So Tzu learned he should care about tending babies and bringing home things for the pretend mama to cook, though his own mama never cooked. He also learned to run as fast as he could and to wrestle hard and cleverly and never give up.

When he was five years old, he read and did his numbers far better than the average for his age, and his tutors were well-satisfied with his progress. Each of them told him so.

Then one day he had a new tutor. This tutor seemed to be more important than all the others. Tzu played with him five or six times a day, fifteen minutes at a time. And the games were new ones. There would be shapes. He would be given a red one that was eight small blocks stuck together, and then from a group of pictures of blocks he had to choose which one was the same shape. “Not the same color—it can be a different color. The same shape,” said the tutor. Soon Tzu was very good at finding that shape no matter how the picture was turned around and twisted, and no matter what color it was. Then the tutor would bring out a new shape, and they’d start over.

He was also given logic questions that made him think for a long time, but soon he learned to find the classifications that were being used. All dogs have four legs. This animal has four legs. Is it a dog? Maybe. Only mammals have fur. This animal has fur. Is it a mammal? Yes. All dogs have four legs. This animal has three legs. Is it a dog? It might be an injured dog—some injured dogs have only three legs. But I said all dogs have four legs. And I said some dogs have only three legs because they’re
broken
but they’re still dogs! And the tutor smiled and agreed with him.

Then there were the memorization tests. He learned to memorize longer and longer lists of things by putting them inside a toy cupboard the tutor told him to create in his mind, or by mentally stacking them on top of each other, or putting them inside each other. This was fun for a while, though pretty soon he got sick of having all kinds of meaningless lists perfectly memorized. It wasn’t funny after a while to have the ball come out of the fish which came out of the tree which came out of the car which came out of the briefcase, but he couldn’t get it out of his memory.

Once he had played them often enough, Tzu became bored with all the games. That was when he realized that they were not games at all. “But you must go on,” the tutor would say. “Your father wants you to.”

“He didn’t say so.”

“He told
me
. That’s why he brought me here. So you would become very good at these games.”

“I
am
very good at them.”

“But we want you to be the
best
.”

“Who is better? You?”

“I’m an adult.”

“How can I be best if nobody is worst?”

“We want you to be one of the best of all the five-year-old children in the world.”

“Why?”

The tutor paused, considering. Tzu knew that this meant he would probably tell a lie. “There are people who go around playing these games with children, and they give a prize to the best ones.”

“What’s the prize?” asked Tzu suspiciously.

“What do you want it to be?” asked the tutor playfully. Tzu hated it when he acted playful.

“Mama to be home more. She never plays with me.”

“Your mama is very busy. And that can’t be the prize because the people who give the prize aren’t your mama.”

“That’s what I want.”

“What if the prize was a ride in a spaceship?” said the tutor.

“I don’t care about a ride in a spaceship,” said Tzu. “I saw the pictures. It’s just more stars out there, the same as you see from here in Nanyang. Only Earth is little and far away. I don’t want to be far away.”

“Don’t worry,” said the tutor. “The prize will make you very happy and it will make your father very proud.”

“If I win,” said Tzu. He thought of the times that other children beat him in races and wrestling. He usually won but not always. He tried to think how they would turn these games into a contest. Would he have to make shapes for the other child to guess, and the child would make shapes for him? He tried to think up logic questions and lists to memorize. Lists that you
couldn’t
put inside each other or stack up. Except that he could always imagine something going inside something else. He could imagine
anything
. He just ended up with more stupid lists he couldn’t forget.

Life was getting dull. He wanted to go outside of the garden walls and walk around the noisy streets. He could hear cars and people and bicycles on the other side of the gate, and when he stuck his eye right up against the crack in the gate he could see them whiz by on the street. Most of the pedestrians were talking Chinese, like the servants, instead of Common, like Father and the tutors, but he understood both languages very well, and Father was proud of that, too. “Chinese is the language of emperors,” said Father, “but Common is the language that the rest of the world understands. You will be fluent in both.”

But even though Tzu knew Chinese, he could hardly understand what was said by the passersby. They spoke so quickly and their voices rose and fell in pitch, so it was hard to hear, and they were talking about things he didn’t understand. There was a whole world he knew nothing about, and he never got to see it because he was always inside the garden playing with tutors.

“Let’s go outside the walls today,” he said to his Common tutor.

“But I’m here for us to read together,” she said.

“Let’s go outside the walls and read today,” said Tzu.

“I can’t,” she said. “I don’t have the key.”

“Mu-ren has a key,” said Tzu. He had seen the cook go out of the gate to shop for food in the market and come back with a cart. “Pei-tian has a key, too.” That was Father’s driver, who brought the car in and out through the gate.

“But
I
don’t have a key.”

Was she really this stupid? Tzu ran to Mu-ren and said, “Wei Dun-nuan needs a key to the gate.”

“She does?” said Mu-ren. “Whatever for.”

“So we can go outside and read.”

By then Mu-ren had caught up with him. She shook her head at Mu-ren. Mu-ren squatted in front of Tzu. “Little Master,” she said, “you don’t need to go outside. Your papa doesn’t want you out on the street.”

That was when Tzu realized he was a prisoner.

They come here and teach me what Father wants me to learn. I’m supposed to become the best child. Even the children that come here are the ones they pick for me. How do I know if I’m the best, when I never get to find children on my own? And what does it matter if I’m best at boring games? Why can’t I ever leave this house and garden?

“To keep you safe,” Father explained that evening. Mu-ren or the tutor must have told him about the key. “You’re a very important little boy. I don’t want you to be hurt.”

“I won’t be hurt.”

“That’s because you won’t go out there until you’re ready,” said Father. “Right now you have more important things to do. Our garden is very large. You can explore anywhere you want.”

“I’ve looked at all of it.”

“Look again,” said Father. “There’s always more to find.”