IGMS Issue 44 (21 page)

I pound the hilt of my sword into the
valkyr
's legs. The rust finally wins out and the pommel snaps off.

"Enough, you bitch! Enough!" I scream up at her. My voice croaks out as dust.

If she notices she gives no sign. She towers silently.

A voice whispers "please." I feel something brush my foot, but it is only a severed arm grasping my ankle. I try to kick it away and give up.

What are you doing? Back to it!
Shut up, old man.

This is not glory.

Oddr is watching me like a furtive child; he chews sheepishly.

"You're no hero," I try to say. It doesn't come out right. I'm not sure he understands me.

I look back to the
valkyr
. Her eyes are fixed far away.

Oddr casts a nervous glance over his shoulder. The
heerth
is being driven back. The line will reach us soon.

The pain in my head is fresh and real, and I can feel it moving through me. It brings with it warm memories. Gora and sun and waving grass. Skies without lightning.

How long has it been since I unclenched my right hand? It takes some doing, flexing of fingers, muscles locked in rigor mortis. I pound on it with my shield. Some bones snap and that pain is real too. I scream in spite of myself.

Oddr continues to watch. The battle has moved closer, the noise is rising.

Another shot and the sword comes loose, dropping onto the arm and about my ankle.

Sword in hand, you fool! Pick it up! Pick it up!

Oddr and I both stare stupidly at my hand. It looks short and withered without a weapon. The
valkyr
pays no attention.

The sky flickers again. I raise my sword hand to my head in what I realize is a pained gesture. Oddr looks afraid.

Then he is swept away as the battle reaches us.

My father's screaming has become agonizing. The pain is fresh, real and most importantly, altogether new.
Pick it up! Up! Up! Up! You're a hero! Sword in hand!

No, papa. I'm no hero. Illugi runs towards me, axe held high, shrieking a war cry. He doesn't even recognize me without my sword. Not that it matters

"Illugi," I yell, the pain giving my voice pitch and edge, "drop your blade. Let's lie down together."

Illugi picks up short of me, his eyes clouded with confusion. He keeps staring at my empty hand.

"Come on, Illugi. Enough of this. This goes nowhere. We will fight until we're twitching meat. There is no death here. No glory."

Illugi sputters. "We are heroes! The songs have said . . ."

"The songs lied, Illugi. I don't want to be a song anymore. I'm tired."

I try to jerk my thumb in the direction of the
valkyr
before I realize the digit is missing. "Don't give her the satisfaction."

Illugi looks around him as if to confirm his surroundings. An armless corpse knee-walks towards him, biting at his legs. He decapitates it absentmindedly.

"I'm tired, Illugi. Aren't you?"

In answer, he buries his axe in my chest. The pain is again real, the fatigue overwhelming. I let it carry me into the dust and swarming bodies.

He shakes his head, freeing himself and then moves back into the fighting, shouting reassurance, though I can't tell for whom.

Hands under my arms. Oddr is dragging me back to the
valhal
. Let him. I'm too tired to move anyway. I gesture to the hole between my ribs where Illugi's weapon pierced me. "Hurts!" I say, grinning. Oddr grins back. His teeth have long since been filed into yellow points. I notice for the first time that he is missing an eye and an ear, both on the same side of his head. His nose is a gray hole in his face.

He drops me by the hall and regards me for one more moment. I prop myself up on my elbows and watch him.

His torn face stretches into a grin as he props his hammer against the hall. He flexes his empty hands and looks at them as if for the first time.

The battle spins and pulses, shouts of greeting and of rage echo out to me.

That's fine. This battle has gone on for as long as any of us can remember. This dawn spans centuries. Time is my ally. We can reach them. With time we can reach them all.

Hands around my neck, a voice pleading, begging me to lie down.

My head is still throbbing, but there is a curious silence.

I can't hear my father.

We have time. I stand to reenter the melee, no weapons in my hands, my shield a useless nub of rusted metal. Oddr, also weaponless, jogs along at my side.

The familiar cry rises to welcome us.

" 'Ware arrows!"

"Shields up."

Myke Cole is a solidly-built, muscular man with an undeniable "military bearing," which can be readily explained by the background described below. Your fleeting first thought upon meeting him might be "I'm glad he's on our side," but as soon as he cracks a smile, you realize he's
one of us
, a fan of science fiction, comics, gaming, the whole works. I met him first when he showed up at the house of the late George Scithers to read slush for
Weird Tales
(which I co-edited with George). We bought Myke's first story. Since then he has published much more, most notably the Shadow Ops series of novels from Ace, which have come close to inventing a new genre of military fantasy.

SCHWEITZER:
So, tell our readers something about your background, who you are, where you come from, your education and real-life career outside of writing.

COLE:
I'm most known for my career in intelligence, the military and law enforcement. I started out in intelligence during the post 9/11 furor when the country went collectively mad and started allowing "Private Military Contractors" (read: Mercenaries) to do all sorts of jobs that had previously been reserved for government officials and uniformed personnel. I was trained at a private boot camp known as "The Crucible" (it's still in business -
http://www.team-crucible.com/
) and did two tours in Iraq in this status. I began to sour on profit-driven armed service after my second tour, and secured a position as a federal intelligence officer (read: Spy) with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) where I did one more tour in Iraq for which I received the Secretary of Defense's Global War on Terrorism Medal and the Joint Service Commendation Medal from Admiral McRaven, the head of U.S. Special Forces. After a few years with DIA, I got a management gig at the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). By this time I was starting to sour on the intelligence mission. It is the mission of intelligence to break the laws and steal the property of other countries, and while I understand that this is sometimes necessary, it is also nasty, and I didn't want to do it anymore. I promised myself that if I ever got a book deal, I would quit the business and move to Brooklyn to be a writer, and that's exactly what happened.

During my civilian career in intel, I also served as a reservist with the U.S. Coast Guard, which I left (reluctantly, but I was souring on the U.S. military mission as well) just last month. I
loved
my time in the guard, where I led the law enforcement and search-and-rescue boat squadron in New York City. The focus of my unit was life-
saving
, rather than life-
taking
(you could think of us as patrol cops and an ambulance combined), and that made all the difference for me. It's only been a month and I already miss it like hell. I currently do specialized work for a large metropolitan police force.

Other than that, it's the standard nerd fare: I'm a huge comic book, F/SF reader, and gamer. I grew up on D&D, Lovecraft, Tolkien and Orson Scott Card, much as I imagine you and many of your readers did. I'm a frustrated academic who never pursued real scholarship because I wanted to make money. I have dreamed of being a fantasy writer all my life, and I still can't believe I'm actually doing it, three years after going pro.

SCHWEITZER:
How do you think the editorial work you did (for
Weird Tales
) influenced the beginning of your career? Did it, at the very least, enable you to avoid some of the obvious errors you saw over and over again in the slush pile?

COLE:
I always get a tear in my eye when I remember my time at
Weird Tales
. I would drive the three hours from DC to George Scithers' house at 123 Crooked Lane, and we would spend the day in his basement crunching slush. George had such an unbridled enthusiasm for the fan scene, joyous and infectious, and it couldn't help but lift your mood. I have spent my entire life in very dark fields, where everything is draped in serious cloth and weighted down with gravitas. I see the worst humanity has to offer. Many don't know that George was also an army officer, so he spoke my language, but he never let it interfere with his first love - genre. I needed that contact. When George moved to Maryland, he contacted me a few times and asked me to visit, and I always put it off, being busy. I knew he was there, and I missed him. I just always assumed there would be time.

There wasn't. I know it isn't the question you asked, but thinking about
Weird Tales
always makes me want to remind people to tell those around them how much they love them, and to make time to see them. Life can be uncertain.
Tempus fugit, memento mori
.

My time editing taught me less about craft, and more about numbers and the inherent callousness of the business. Every time I sat down to tackle the slush pile, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of manuscripts. We would work in that warm, comfy basement for 12 hours sometimes (laughing and joking the whole while), and it wasn't nearly enough time to give any manuscript more than a cursory read (we're talking the first couple of paragraphs before putting it down, unless those couple of paragraphs absolutely blew me away). The lesson here was this: George and I were fans, passionate genre advocates, and dedicated to finding exciting new voices in the field. Even with all that, the volume of submissions was just too massive to be anything other than utterly callous. If it didn't grab us, it got rejected. We didn't have time to be nice. We didn't have the bandwidth to take more time. The task bent me around it, shaped me into the kind of editor that I'd most feared as an aspiring writer. As manuscript after manuscript went by, the hard lesson was drilled in: It wasn't enough to be good. It wasn't even enough to be great. You had to be
the best
. Your writing had to be
sublime
.

We have a saying in the guard that I intend to have tattooed around my forearm once I finish the current quarter-sleeve I'm working on: "The sea doesn't care about you." This sounds cruel, but it isn't. Clear observation of reality and sympathy aren't at odds, and there isn't a zero sum game here. I feel for every aspirant, and absolutely sympathize with how tough it is to both break in, and to maintain momentum once you do. But working at
Weird Tales
taught me one thing and that is this: that once you've tipped your hat to the challenge, there's nothing more to do other than the work. It is the only thing that ever makes a difference.

SCHWEITZER:
So, we can't help but notice that a good deal of what gets published is somewhat less than sublime when you actually see it on the printed page. Much of it falls into the "this is kind of okay, I guess we could publish it" category. Do you think there's some distortion here, in the sense that after a day of reading awful slush, a more or less competent story suddenly looks brilliant?

COLE:
I think that art is subjective. Art is . . . art, not science. I just saw the highly acclaimed film
Under the Skin
starring Scarlett Johansson. This is one of the most critically praised SF films ever, and named by many critics as the best film of 2014. I absolutely hated it. Not normal hate. Not just, "I'd rather not see this," but "DEAR GOD WHAT IS THIS CATASTROPHE DOING TO MY BRAIN?" For a long time after, I was really upset with myself. If I so violently disagreed with so many reputable people, didn't that mean that I was clueless? That I had poor taste? That I didn't understand what made a great story?

But after I'd had some time to think on it, I realized that this is just the way it is with a subjective discipline. I just finished Ray Bradbury's
Something Wicked This Way Comes
, and didn't enjoy it because I felt his gorgeous prose obscured a clear narrative. I don't like Neil Gaiman's prose, but love his comic books. I am not blind to the fact that I'm swimming against the current with both of those positions.

Our appreciation for a work of art is also dependent on who
we
are at the time we read it. Our lens changes with experience, and the same work may affect us in different ways. If I'd read
Something Wicked
as a 14 year old, I might have loved it, because it's essentially a kind of manic
bildungsroman
about early adolescence. Who knows what I'll think if I read it again at age 70?