Endeavors of Will Read online

  For the third time that night I ran, deep into the badlands, until each breath was anguish and I fell more often than I walked erect. Then I let myself fall into a cut of rock too shallow to be called a cave and lay upon my back, seeking the Moon, or the first rays of the Sun.

  My eyes--half-dazzled from the exploding vial--played me false.

  There seemed to be a thousand, a million Moons in the sky. I rubbed my face with torn hands. The illusion persisted. I counted to three hundred fifty, blind, and opened my eyes once more to the multitude of tiny Moons and the large one--there--near the very end of its night time stroll.

  And I lay in the rockcut and stared at the sky until the Sun came up and the Moon disappeared and the little Moons melted in the blueness of the daytime sky, and thought brave thoughts of Lena, laughing.

  First published in Dragonfields, Winter 1982

  The Winter Consort

  THE SUN LEAVES the sky at mid-day now, and the garden outside my window is brown and sere. It snowed again early this morning--he’ll be here, oh, surely, on the morrow.

  I can’t recall, quite, but it seems that he’s never been this late before.

  Always he arrived on the day of the season’s first snowfall. There it would be, spread ’round and about like the new-sown stardust, sparkling in the heavy rays of the low-hanging sun; wrapping the world in silent, glittering promises.

  And then from the forest--a sound. Snow falling from a branch, perhaps, or a sapling snapping 'neath its diamond blanket--no. The sound, unmistakably, of a single horse, and a few moments later a sight of the animal itself--none but a dead black charger would milord have--and a glimpse of the sun-haired rider.

  They would disappear, then, horse and rider, hidden by the roll of the Castle parkland, and I--I would fly down the broad stone hallways, calling to the servants to prepare, that here he was come at last; and burst out into the crystal air, cloakless, in time to have my first full sight of him as he topped the final rise, paused for a moment and then sent his steed galloping down the last slope to the Castle. To me.

  I remember now, yes. One season he was so delayed by some problem of the military or such... He sent a message by eaglehawk, I recall--a splendid bird all gold and velvet--and did not himself arrive ’til way after the second snow. He was weary when finally he did come, and spoke of things strange to me--and disturbing. He spoke of unrest ’mong the people, of a certain dissatisfaction with his rule--as if any could believe milord to be moved by aught but kindness and loving wisdom--and of the evil suspicions that plagued him, that someone close--he would name no name--was working to accomplish his death. He said he was growing old...

  I was fifteen when he brought me here, to hide my beauty--I was very beautiful--from the jealous eye of she, who had bound him already; and every Winter without fail has he come to me. The Winter is the best season in this land. The days are brimful of sunshine, the nights are lit by enormous stars hung just beyond my reach in a soft, blue velvet sky. Milord spends his time here at leisure; I read and sing to him. Sometimes he calls me his pretty child, takes the book from my hand and draws me to his knee, as if I were indeed a child. Other times, he calls me his most precious possession, his songbird; and smiles so that my heart grows wings within me.

  With the first sign of Spring, he leaves me.

  One year--I was very young, very foolish,--I ordered the gardener to rise each morning at dawnlight, steal out and go among the grounds, stripping the trees of any unfurling leaf, robbing the flowers of new shoots and buds. In this way I sought to keep milord with me--just for awhile longer.

  The plan seemed to work. Then, one morning, as I took my exercise in the same garden I now gaze upon, I spied a bird--unquestionable sign of Spring, even here. Without thought, I stooped, laid hold of a stone, and flung it. Whether god or demon guided that rock, still I do not know. The bird died upon the spot; and simultaneous with its death, I heard behind me a shocked intake of breath.

  I spun to see him--my lord and my beloved--not an arm’s length away. I met his eyes for a heartbeat; dropped my own in terror. I heard him turn, move away. It seemed days until I could myself move and go racing back to the Castle, crying out for him. But he had already gone.

  That summer I bore him a son. His only son. She, the woman in the South, can produce nothing more than daughters, wan reflections of her own delicacy and indolence. It is communion with the clear sharpness of ice and the wind that ever mutters over a rockbound land, which, even in its Summer, is never hot, that gives a woman the strength to birth a manchild.

  When milord returned to me that Winter, any harshness he might have dealt me--deserved, for my folly--was swallowed up in his delight with the boy. Our son. As the Spring-time grew nearer, milord began to speak of the way in which our son would grow, strong in body and wisdom; and how, one day, he would be King in the land to the South. So when the first Spring birds swelled their throats for song and milord rode away across the parkland and vanished into the forest, our son and his nurse rode with him.

  My boy was raised by the woman in the South--milord’s wife--and calls her Mother; and uses the ways of the hotlands as his own, so that one day he may be King as his father is King. But he is blood and bone of me, not she. Never she.

  Milord has never waited ’til this far into the season. If he does not come soon, the way will be blocked with snowhills and icewalls. Still, he has sent me no message--I must believe that he will come; in his own time, perhaps. But come he shall.

  Another day and still he does not arrive. The waiting, the pacing of room to empty room is maddening. The Winter has never been so chill. The sky and the snow are the hue of iron; and the Wind thrusts his cunning sword in through an hundred crevices in the wall. The air is thick and so heavy with ice that I can scarce force my lungs to take it. I must go outside, mayhap the air is lighter there.

  I drag on my boots, my cloak; go out into the ill-lit day. My body screams for motion, but there is nothing to make the object of a walk through this colorless waste. I pace, as I did within, the boundaries of my cage only slightly extended now.

  And then, from the forest--a sound. Snow falling from a branch, perhaps, or a sapling snapping ’neath its diamond blanket--no. No, the sound of a horse, of several horses--moving with lack-wit speed down the iced and dangerful path.

  A moment later, they come into sight; in the lead a dead black charger, the figure hunched low ’pon his neck unmistakable; and a dappled gray pursuing, his rider a scarlet-cloaked stranger.

  They vanish then, all four, behind the roll of parkland and I stand waiting for them to reappear, no breath frosting the air before me. The charger tops the final rise, starts down the slope to the castle, to me. The gray is barely a stone’s toss behind. I stand completely still as the black looms toward me, do not flinch as he suddenly rears, unseating his curiously limp rider, wheels and races off again, to the forest. To the South.

  I start to run, then, toward the crumpled and oddly broken-seeming shape in the snow. But my body moves in nightmare motion and it is the scarlet rider who kneels by him first.

  The face he lifts at my approach could be the very one I wear--saving only the lesser years and the gleam of exultation in his eyes. He rises, dons his hat and all but sings the phrase, "The King is dead."

  "Long live the King," my own voice, lifeless as a music box.

  He approaches me; seeks to take me in his arms. Blood of my blood. Bone of my bone. Raised by the woman in the South, but never hers. No, never.

  He smiles down upon me, puzzled, "He’s dead now, Mother. You’re free." He reaches out again, shakes me lightly by the shoulder, as his smile somewhat dims, "You can come home..."

  First published in SPWAO Showcase, 1982

  The Pretender

  OLIVER HANSON BROWN lived in the second-most imposing house on MacArthur Avenue with his father, Andrew Alexander Brown, the Attorney; his older brother, Andrew Alexander Brown II, the Surgeon; and his mother, the former Miss
Justine Hanson. Oliver was eight.

  Oliver. From the first, a veritable paragon of impropriety and fractured timing. His mother despaired of keeping him in matched socks; his cap was always other than upon his head and his pockets--those that had miraculously escaped hyper-ventilation--were always crammed with a weird and motley collection of objects--gathered from heaven knew where--to which he was forever making additions.

  He loved dogs--the more flea-bitten the better--and cats who wore the sagas of their million alley skirmishes proudly in view for all to read. He loathed the canary, and had at one point been just barely restrained from enlivening the tropical fish tank with a half-dozen earthworms.

  Puns were his heart’s delight. And where, Mrs. Brown would wonder at the conclusion of particularly trying days, oh, where had he gotten such very red hair? Certainly not from her side of the family. And she would quickly glance in the mirror at her own determinedly yellow curls and sigh in exquisite relief.

  It was Oliver’s view that his mother too often got her way in such minor, though annoying, matters as what was proper dress for birthday parties--including his own--what one properly ate for breakfast and how one properly arrived home from school--on time and quietly. There were, however, other matters, such as which people one was allowed to speak to; where one was allowed to travel on one’s own; and what time one had to be in bed--lights out--that the boy considered to be nothing more than blatant violation of his privacy. His mother did not consider privacy an essential requirement of eight year old boys.

  It appeared to Oliver that his mother was determined in her wrong-headedness to have him grow up to be like Andrew Alex--or, worse, to be another whiny-voiced piece of nastiness like his married sister, Charlotte Eunice. And, in his deepest heart, Oliver feared that determination and was not bolstered by the realization that everyone, practically, was on Mrs. Brown’s side--even his father--and he stood alone against the whole family and his teachers and all the neighbors. It was just him, Oliver, against a world full of hostile adults--who were stronger, if not especially bright--and, in his rare moments of sober reflection, the knowledge frightened him.

  Mostly, though, he persisted along his noisy, scattered way; and if he had always one mental ear cocked to the rear for the swish of the axeman’s blade, this preoccupation in no way prevented him from driving all grown persons around him to ultimate distraction.

  When not in school or serving punishment-time within his mother’s house, Oliver would wander the neighborhood, alone--the other, more proper children viewed his antics with puzzled alarm and avoided him, with an eye to their own good standing with the adults--and gather objects to add to the miscellanea in his pockets. He was a miniature, mobile museum of bird feathers, colored stones, broken jewelry, odd coins, slugs of lead, assorted acorns, bits of twine, curious buttons and solitary playing cards. The pieces to be found upon his person were never the same for two days together--except of course, for the true essentials: his lucky coin, the feather he had obtained at great personal risk from the nether portion of Mr. Mclntyre’s cockatoo, and the seamed leather collar he meant to bestow upon the princely animal that finally did follow him home.

  Once added to the collection, however, no item was ever subtracted. In his room, in a place so secret that he tried not even to think about it, in case of mind-readers or magicians, Oliver had a deep wooden box--a prize won from a department store trash heap one summer’s afternoon--and there he kept in grand disarray all--every one--of his lovingly acquired treasures.

  It was on one of his solitary ramble-cum-treasure hunts that he found what he pegged as the piece-de-resistance of his collection from the moment he spied it lying among the phlox that cloaked old Mrs. Embrey’s front lawn.

  He reached out for it immediately, but had not made contact when he snatched back his hand and bent instead to take a closer look.

  It wasn’t a stone, as he had first thought; nor was it a marble--exactly. There was something... well, funny, about it. For one thing, the color was strange; Oliver couldn’t quite remember having seen that particular shade of red before. And, for another thing, it glowed, sort of; as if there was a tiny fire deep in the heart of the thing and every so often the flames would flicker.

  It sure was strange...

  Oliver wanted it, though, more than he had ever wanted anything before. He liked the deep redness of the thing and the way it seemed made out of smooth, solid color, rather than glass or fired clay. And it looked cool and hand-soothing, in spite of the flame at its center.

  In the end, of course, desire for the colorsphere outweighed his first sense of wrongness and he reached down among the white and purple flowers and curled his hand around the thing.

  It was cool, and new-grass smooth in his palm. Further up his arm, Oliver noticed a faint tingle, like a small electrical shock, except that it kept on, instead of fading out. The sensation wasn’t painful, or even unpleasant, so he ignored it and ran down the street with his new acquisition to a place where he could inspect it in private.

  Oliver’s private place was in his own backyard, quite literally; but as safe from his mother’s prying ways and the interference of other adults as the sanctum sanctorum of a Martian monastery. His mother would never have braved the cattail-guarded and marshy pathway that was the only route to the old tool shed at the foot of the hill; the gardener himself no longer used it, preferring to store his seeds and tools in the relative aridity of the garage-loft.

  So the shed was forgotten until Oliver; prowling the boundaries of a Springtime punishment, rediscovered and made it his.

  Fabulous stone clenched tight in his fist, then, Oliver raced down the path to his secret place, dove through the boy-sized hole in the side wall--the gardener had nailed shut the proper door when he had vacated--and into the dim and damp interior, to fling himself down on the pile of doubtful blankets under the single, glassless window. He thrust his fist into the pool of late day sunshine upon the floor and opened his fingers, one by one.

  There it lay in the center of his palm, striking back at the sunrays with its own cold-burning fire, as large as his best glass shooter, as magnificent as a robin’s egg ruby, shaped, somehow, as much from Mystery as from solid color. Oliver drew a deep and shuddering breath, eyes only on the ball of crimson in his hand, burning deep inside itself, smooth and caressing his skin. It was beautiful. It was his. He felt--knew--that it had been waiting, there in Mrs. Embrey’s garden, waiting for him to find it.

  Abruptly, Oliver closed his fist, pulled his arm back into shadow. He leaned his head back, rested it against the wall, closed his eyes and sat, miraculously, still; and concentrated on the sensation of the stone resting in his hand. It seemed warmer now, satiny against his rough boy-hand. Almost, it seemed a part of him. The tingling sensation in his arm was more pronounced, but still not unpleasant--just the opposite, actually.

  Oliver settled his head more closely against the soggy wood, and let his thoughts drift daydream-wise among the pastel colors of pleasure and pride of ownership. Whoever had lost this treasure must now feel sad and poor beyond measure. Oliver smiled faintly, and unconsciously tightened his fingers still more. A treasure, yes, exactly; beautiful and rare and so much itself that Oliver could not imagine that it had ever been made. No, he decided, drowsily, it had always been exactly as it was now. And it must be Old...

  "WHO HOLDS THE ANWISH GEM THAT DENIES ME THE ALTERNATE KINGDOMS?"

  Like thunder, like an earthquake, like Vesuvius resurrected, the Voice came from Nowhere, from Everywhere. Oliver found himself standing, back braced firmly against the wall, the fist in which he clenched his prize out before him, as if he held a sword.

  In the center of the room, directly in front of the boy, a swirling and sickly green flame appeared, grew rapidly more vivid, bright to the point of eye-pain and then drew in upon itself, coalesced... And, somehow, became a man.

  He was long and thin, dressed in loose-fitting clothing, the same vivid hue as the flame that
had preceded him. His beard and hair were dark and tangled; his eyes a bright and deadly orange.

  He fixed Oliver with those eyes and stretched forth one ring-laden hand, imperious. "Give me the stone, boy."

  The words, the voice, acted upon Oliver as had no command before uttered by any mere adult. The Halloween-eyed stranger wanted the red stone? Why, sure--the faint tingle in his outstretched arm became a stab of bone-marrow lightning--hot, but not burning--and suddenly all that was redheaded in Oliver snapped to the fore; he stood his ground and glared at the stranger.

  "No!"

  The man frowned, seemed to loom larger, though he did not move; and his voice shook the tool shed with the force of a stormwind, "What you hold is my rightful treasure. I require its especial powers to hold the rule o’er my land. Its virtues are one with the nature of the Alternate Kingdoms; it is nothing and less than that here." He pointed his finger at Oliver once more. "Give me my talisman, boy; I grow rapidly weary of games."

  But Oliver was in a passion, now, the source of which he could not identify. He knew only that the scarlet heat in his arm now warmed his entire body and that with the spread of that warmth had come this conviction:

  The stranger could not harm him. As long as Oliver did not relinquish the stone.

  "It’s not yours! It hates you. I found it and it likes me and I’m going to keep it! And you can’t take it away!"

  The stranger drew a deep breath and his eyes burned even oranger; something made of snaky green light began to grow from the tip of his out-stretched finger.

  From Oliver’s ready-held fist there leapt suddenly a ragged sheet of scarlet. It struck the green-clad man with a concussion like silent thunder, flared until the room was full of crimson light and vanished utterly.