The Wildside Book of Fantasy: 20 Great Tales of Fantasy (2 page)

“What?” I say.

“You know how to use it,” she murmurs, and then I feel the backlash, the Jessamine in my head reflecting the other Jessamine’s outrage at someone even touching this computer, her precious friend, making it do tricks without asking.

“Oh, this makes me tired,” I say. I make my tea and slam the kettle down on the burner, denting its edge, full of rage and fatigue from fighting this self forced on me.

I sit.

I see the egg-shaped spell, golden as earth, that I found in the hills, and a sweet taste touches my tongue.

Before my interior Jessamine can stop me -- I had no idea that she had these shudders under her skin all the time, worries always that edges are not clean, that touch is not safe -- I cradle the spell in my hands. Comfort seeps into me. This spell’s history isn’t entirely clear to me. I only know someone cast it a long time ago, and that it worked beautifully, so beautifully that the Earth reached up and made it into treasure in memory of its power. No spell that hurts anyone ever gets pearled like this.

Part of me wants to fling the ugly, dirty thing from me, banish it from the house. The other part turns the spell over and traces the glyph of welcome on the grainy sandstone surface. Answering warmth wakes under my fingertip. The spell is joyous with its own power. I cup my hands around it and taste its flavor, waiting for the spell to tell me what it does. Juicy sourgrass stems, cinnamon, wheatbread, green grapes -- a harvest spell, of sorts.

Harvest.

What would I plant? What reap?

This experience of having the Other inside me. Already planted. Already grown and flowered. Fruit, unbearable fruit. Can I harvest it now and lay it away?

I stroke the spell, trace some glyphs of inquiry into it. The Jessamine in my head watches, quiet, not protesting.

The red warmth of wine answers my touch. The spell accepts my alterations.

“Will you go quietly?” I ask.

“Oh, yes,” she says with my mouth. And past all her fears and worries, I feel the great flood of love she feels for me, the gratitude and exasperation and choked delight and longing, the leaves of so many shared memories, laughter and starlight and wonder, times we pushed each other away but came back, times we asked hard questions and stayed for hard answers, times we surprised each other.

For a moment I think, I can live with this.

Then she says, “Let’s go, Ell. You can’t live with me. You know it and I know it.”

It is her hand in my hand that lifts the stone to my mouth, her lips in my lips that press the opening glyph into the spell’s skin.

The rock melts. The spell opens. Shimmering gold and green light weaves around me, and I see orchards flowering with spring rain, leafing out green with summer’s sun, sturdy and strong from earth, air, water, sunfire, all mixed with each fruit’s own signature. Jessamine grows strong and ripe inside me. For a little while I am afraid that I will be cast into dreams indeed, leaving Jessamine alone in my head.

She grows more, basking in the light, too big now to be contained. I cry aloud as pain flashes through me, and then she is reft from me.

When my eyes clear, I hold a perfect black plum in my hands, and Jessamine is gone from my head.

She stares across the table at me. “What happened?” she whispers, pale and frightened.

“It’s all right,” I say. The spell is gone and I send gratitude after it. I set the plum on the table. I look at the cookies on the plate and sigh with happiness, blessing my singular state. “Don’t ever do that again.”

She picks up her computer, turns it so I can see the spell on the screen. She selects the entire document and hits the delete button. The spell vanishes.

“Take it off the flashcard too,” I say.

Her eyes widen, but she opens the memory storage card and removes the spell from that as well.

It doesn’t matter. If she really wants to, she can reconstruct the spell from scratch. I know better than ever how her mind works now. Anything she spent so much time crafting is etched into her brain.

“I love you,” I say. “But I don’t want to be you.”

She shakes her head. “I understand.”

“You don’t,” I say. “You don’t want to.” I push the plum and it rolls all the way across the table to stop in front of her. “But if you want to know what it was like to be you inside of me, taste this.”

She picks up the plum and stares at me. I remember two girls sitting on a front stoop in Brooklyn. I remember us walking along a seaside street on a misty evening, things silvered with street light and damp, the only warmth her hand in mine.

Sometimes I want never to see her again.

Sometimes I’m so angry with her I want to scream.

She’s my best friend in all the world.

She raises the plum to her mouth and takes a bite.

THE DOLPHIN AND THE DEEP, by Thomas Burnett Swann

I: THE TRITON

From the time I was a small child I have liked to wander. Once, at the age of five, I ran away from my parents’ villa in Caere and followed the road to the necropolis. But the burial mounds frightened me. Carved out of red tufa stone and heaped with soil, they crouched like demons from Avernus. I peered through their narrow entrances and thought of Tuchuicha, the monster with the face of a vulture and the ears of a donkey. Wild roses scratched my legs and a blue-eyed owl cried eerily from a cypress tree. I hid in a nest of cyclamen and fell asleep. My father came in his chariot to find me. “You wander furiously,” he said, “then, like a cub, fall asleep. I will call you Bear.”

In spite of the mishap I soon ran away again, and my coming to manhood served only to legitimize what, for a child, was forbidden. I visited Veil with its cyclopean walls, and proud, drab little Rome, where Tarquin the Proud was ruling a restless people. I visited the Sybarites, who cover their highways with canvas to shade their delicate complexions. I studied the Mysteries at Borsippa, near Babylon, and navigation at Carthage. But wherever I went I dreamed of somewhere else, another city, another sea, and being a young man of wealth and leisure, with parents who humored if not encouraged me, I was able to go where I chose.

Thus it was that I began the last of all my voyages, the longest and by far the most perilous, in search of love. It began, like the other voyages, with a simple wish to explore. My people, the Etruscans, had founded a colony at Adria, on the eastern coast of Hesperia. It was young; it piqued my sense of adventure. I bought passage on a small merchantman, the
Turan,
and skirting the hostile cities of Magna Graecia, sailed up the coast of Adria. Three days sufficed to show me the town, a mere hamlet of sickly cattle and plain women, with never a sign of Gauls. The real adventure began when I returned south with the
Turan
. A sudden shore wind swept us away from land and, dead in our path, a jagged island stabbed from the sea. A palace in the style of the old Cretan sea-kings, with white walls, blue pediments, and red columns swelling into bulbous capitals, descended in rooms and courtyards toward the water, and stairways circled down to the lapping waves. Feathery tamarisk trees leaned against the walls and a forest of cedars flanked the lowest stairs.

“I would like to go ashore,” I said. Vel, the captain, looked doubtful.

“These are still Greek waters,” he muttered, fingering his pointed beard. Greeks and Etruscans, I knew, raided each other’s shipping without scruple and then raised cries of piracy.

“If a ship comes, leave me.” I brandished a leather pouch of asses, or gold and silver coins.

“You want the dinghy?” He pointed to the small boat attached to our stern.

“No, I’ll swim.” Already I was stripping off my tunic.

“Watch yourself. Our Lady Turan was struck by lightning last night.” I saw that the ship’s figurehead, the goddess whom the Greeks call Aphrodite, was charred and cracked.

I shuddered. Only a fool ignores an omen. Was the goddess protesting my notorious indifference to love by striking her own statue, as if to say, “The next bolt will not strike wood!”? Unmarried at twenty-five, I was not such a man as Turan took to her heart.

Nonsense,
I told myself.
The captain has offended her—such a greedy man!—or one of the crew has forsaken a girl in a port.
I dove in the water and, skirting a school of dolphins which brazenly barred my path, drew myself into the stairs at the foot of the palace. Turquoise lizards, bright as Egyptian scarabs, scurried over my feet. Sand lay heavy on stone. There were no human footprints; only the tracks of an animal, a deer’s perhaps. I climbed the stairs, my bare feet crunching the sand, and entered the palace beneath a lintel of blue gypsum. At once I stepped into an audience chamber dominated by a tall throne of porphyry. On the painted walls leaped dolphins, bluer than skies after storm, and anemones flowered in submarine meadows. Sunlight from clerestory windows lit motes of dust into tiny embers and kindled the red tile floor into burning coals. The hooves of an animal echoed in a distant corridor.

True to my nickname, Bear, I like to prowl, and room by room I explored the palace. In the highest chamber, swallows had built a nest from mud and leaves. A couch with the feet of a lion hunched in the rear. Vials of brilliant glass—amethyst red, and amber—littered the floor like a burst of mushrooms in a temple garden. On one wall, a slim-waisted athlete vaulted a charging bull; on another, a bare-breasted woman, with coiling black curls, sang to a warrior as he boarded his ship. Her eyes were loving and very sad.

Her sadness—indeed, that of the entire palace, with its air of age and neglect—depressed me. I hurried from the room and the palace and down the great stairway to the sea. I paused on the lowest step to feel the sun on my body and catch its rays in the serpent ring I wore. But shadows, not sun, still held me. I lowered myself in the water and swam for the figurehead of the Lady Turan, whose wooden arms looked warm and hospitable. This time the dolphins, one of them a rare albino, parted to let me pass.

Something grasped my ankle. I kicked vigorously, and freed myself. The opaque waters hid my attacker. Warily I resumed my swim. Again the grappling, gentle but insistent; I turned, lunged below the surface, and rose with a prisoner. He struggled at first, then lay still and looked at me with neither fear nor anger—as if to say, “What now?” It was a boy. His hair, the green of seaweed, was fine and silken; long like mine, but loose instead of bound in the usual fillet. I tried to hide my surprise.

“I was playing that you were my father,” he said.

At twenty-five I could hardly imagine myself the father of a boy who looked about twelve, though with current marriage customs, a bride at twelve, a groom at fourteen, it was not unthinkable.

“You don’t mind, do you?” he said. “I followed you when you swam ashore—and waited.”

I released him and treaded water. “No, I don’t mind. But what is my part in the game?”

He showed not the slightest fear of me. “Oh,” he said. “To give chase, which you did splendidly. And then to talk.” He pointed to the island. “Over there. You will be more comfortable.”

I drew myself onto the steps and gave him a hand. He hesitated. “I want to stay in the water.”

“Nonsense. Then I will have to talk down to you.”

He took my hand and thumped beside me. I understood his hesitation. His boy’s body ended with the tail of a fish, green, sparkling and sinuous. In the waters around Hesperia, Tritons were as rare as hippocampi and, in fact, almost extinct. Thus, I had not suspected his identity even when I had seen his hair.

He looked uncomfortable and shyly edged toward the water.

I touched his shoulder. “We haven’t talked yet. I think we have a great deal to tell each other. Do you know, I have always wanted to be a Triton. I love to swim, but my legs get tangled in the water.” To show what I meant, I twisted my legs and floundered over the stairs.

He laughed for the first time. “Yes, I see what you mean. But on land my
tail
gets tangled!”

“We’ll trade sometime. But now you must tell me your name.”

“Astyanax. I got it out of Homer. A sailor once told me about Prince Hector and how he had a son, Astyanax, whom he loved dearly. Hector hated to go to war because he had to leave his son. He tried not to frighten him with his flashing armor. I thought that if I named myself Astyanax, perhaps I would find a Hector.”

“You have no parents?”

“I lost them in a storm and never found them again. That was three years ago.”

“You’ve been alone since then?”

“Sometimes I follow ships, and the sailors toss me grapes. I have to be careful, though. Some of them want to catch me to show in the ports. What’s your name?”

“Arnth,” I said, “though often I am called Bear.”

“Ah,” he said. “You like to rummage—in palaces and such. Like a bear on the prowl.”

“And then I curl up and sleep.”

“Indeed, you have sleepy eyes. I will certainly call you Bear.” He paused. “Were you looking for Circe?”

“Circe, the enchantress?” I cried. “Is that who lived in the palace?”

“Yes, but you are much too late. A hundred years ago—so the dolphins say—a galley came for her, rowed by pygmies. Bears and rabbits, gathered to say goodbye. She smiled at them and spoke a few words—multiply, don’t eat each other, and that kind of thing. When she boarded the galley, a black boy fanned her with ostrich feathers, and a crimson canopy shielded her from the sun. One of the bears—you will love this part—jumped into the water and swam after her, but she waved him back and disappeared into the misty south.”

“Did the bear get back to shore?”

“Oh, yes. His friends helped him up the stairs. He became, in fact, something of a hero.” He hesitated and smiled sheepishly. “I made up the bear because I thought he would please you.”

“It was a charming touch. But tell me more about Circe. Was she still beautiful? Odysseus knew her many centuries ago.”

“The dolphins say she was like the sun, white and burning. When she left it was the sun sinking into the sea.”

“Do you know where she went?”

“Beyond the Pillars of Hercules.”

“North to the Isles of Tin?”

“South along the coast of Libya.”

“How far?”

“Who knows? To the land of the Gorillae, perhaps.”

My senses reeled. Libya, the continent of mist and jungles, pygmies and giants, griffins and sphinxes, and yes, the hairy, horrible Gorillae. The Phoenicians claim that a Tyrian captain once sailed through the Red Sea and around the continent from east to west, but who can believe such a boast? Whether, as Homer thought, the earth is flat and surrounded by the stream of Ocean, or whether, as the Ionians think, it is shaped like a cone or a sphere, a voyage around Libya is like searching for the Golden Fleece—without the help of Jason.

He looked at me wisely. “You will go to find her?”

“To look for her, perhaps.”

He shook his head. “I wish you were Greek instead of Etruscan.”

“Why?”

“Because I would like to go with you, but you are too sad. Like most Etruscans.”

“Etruscans sad?” I protested. “Our robes are as gay as flowers. We dance and sing even at funerals, and paint our tombs with banquets and chariots.”

“Ah,” he said, “but your eyes are sad. They give you away.”

It was true, of course. In the polished bronze of a mirror, the eyes which met my stare were dark and slanted, like those of my ancestors, the Lydians, and old with accumulated sorrows, with the weight of dead cities, buried and moldering, of battles and tortures and beautiful shameless queens who smiled and shook poison from rings like golden spiders.

He saw that the truth had hurt me. “Except for your eyes,” he added, “you look like”—he searched for words—“a well-kept farm! There is plenty of meat to hide your bones, and your cheeks are as red as apples. Your eyes, of course, don’t belong to the farm. They belong to the woods.” His tail sparkled greenly with drops of sea-water, but his chest and shoulders were as pale as foam. Translucent skin traced the delicate bones of his face, and his green, deep-set eyes looked faintly shadowed, as if he were tired or a little hungry.

I ran my hand through his hair. “Astyanax,” I said, “I must leave you soon. But first come aboard my ship and dine with me.”

He hesitated.

“I am not going to steal you.”

“Perhaps you should.” He plunged in the water. “Hold to my tail,” he called. “I will give you a ride!”

When we reached the side of the ship, the crew and the captain crowded the bulwarks. They threw us a rope and Astyanax, using his tail for propulsion, clambered up the side. When I reached the deck, I found him surrounded by sailors. Three of them, adolescent brothers who swaggered like old salts and went by the name of the Black Rats, eyed him with rudeness.

“You may touch my tail,” he said with dignity. “Everyone wants to.”

The Black Rats snickered in unison and one of them said, “Not us, boy. We can look.” White, thin, with soiled black hair and dirty faces, they resembled unwashed turnips.

“You are wise not to touch him,” I snapped. “Your dirt might rub off.” Vanishing into the cabin, I returned with a bunch of grapes and a rhyton of mild red vine. Astyanax emptied the vessel with a single rapid gulp.

“Drinks like a fish,” the one-eared sailor muttered, but Astyanax ignored the remark and crammed his mouth so full of grapes that he looked like a field mouse gorging himself on grain. All the while, he peered around him at the fixtures of the ship, its furled yellow sail, its wicker cabin, and its deck of Etruscan cypress.

“The goats of Amphitrite are starting to kick,” said the captain impatiently, pointing to the white-capped waves which had begun to slap the bow. “It is time to sail.”

Astyanax ate more slowly. “I would like more grapes,” he said when he had finished the first bunch.

I handed him another bunch. “You must take these with you.”

“I want to join your crew,” he announced.

“It isn’t my crew. I am just a passenger.”

He turned to the captain. “Is there room for another passenger? I can fish and mend sails to pay my passage.”

“Can you stay out of water for days at a time?”

“No,” he admitted. “I dehydrate.”

“Well, then, you can’t be a passenger. Over the side now. The goats are impatient.” Indeed, the ship was rocking from side to side as if she were being slapped by a Cyclops.

He wriggled across the deck. I knelt to lift him over the bulwark. He shook his head. “My tail is adequate.”

Poised on the bulwark, he turned and looked at me. “Thank you for the conversation,” he said, and before I could tell him goodbye, he hit the water.

I helped the men lower the sail—I felt a need to keep busy—and the
Turan
cut through the goats like a wolf through a flock.
I will not look back,
I thought.
If I mean to find Circe, how can I encumber myself with a fish-tailed boy who eats like a whale?