The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four (46 page)

Looking like a well-laid but annoyed and put-upon squat polar bear in my bodyglove, some hellish number of minus degrees on the far side of its skin, I stood gazing down from the edge of the excavation. The spacecraft was unaltered, every bloom precisely where it had been several days before, where it had been, perhaps, several tens of millions of years before. Unless it was salted here recently as a snare for gullible humans. In which case, it might be younger than I. Not so likely, though.

"Ready when you are, Sensei," said the political officer, doing Mr. Kim's bidding, and damn the scientists' caution.

I raised one thumb and let myself drift. Cause and effect unbraided, started their long, looping dance of etiological distortion, swirling, curdling. I was the still center of the spinning world. Certainties creaked, cracked. A favorite poem entered my heart, by Ji-Hoon Cho, "Flower petals on the sleeves":

 
The wanderer's long sleeves
Are wet from flower petals.
Twilight over a riverside village
Where wine is mellow.
 

Had this saurian person below me, trapped now in timelessness, known wine? Crushed release and perhaps moments of joy from some archaic fruit not yet grape? I thought, with a wrenching mournfulness:

 
When this night is over
Flowers will fall in that village.
 

"Hey!"

And there went the flowers, drawn up and tossed away from the hull of the starship. They were scattering in the methane wind, lifted and flung by the bitter gusts, floral loveliness snap-frozen, blown upward and falling down in drifts into the alien snow.

"The stationary shield is discontinued," said a clipped voice in my ears.

I stepped forward, ready to enter the ancient, imprisoned place. To meet my dinosaur, who had either died or even now lived, freed from timeless suspension. A hand caught my encased arm.

"Not yet, Sam. We have a team prepped. Thanks, you've done good here today." I turned, hardly able to see through my tears, and it was not that bastard Tony Caetani groveling his apologies, the universe could not be so chirpy as that. I hadn't met this one before, although he'd picked up my dining room nickname and used it with a certain familiar breeziness; a beefy functionary of some armed service division, grinning at me in his bluff farmboy way. I nodded, and watched the team of marines go down, and remembered my dear boy and the way he had gone forward fearlessly into darkness and then into the fire falling from the sky. It did not matter one whit that I thought his cause wrong-headed. I remembered a poem in that book I'd found in the ruined library, a poem by an Englishman named Kipling that had torn my heart as I sat before Song-Dam's closed coffin. There was no comfort this tide, the poem warned me, nor in any tide, save this:

 
he did not shame his kind—
Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.
 

Without shame, I sobbed, but then drew myself up and turned back to Huygens agora. Perhaps, I told myself, ten or sixty million years ago, another father had laid his son on these cruel snows and bade him farewell. I murmured to that reptilian father, offering what poor borrowed comfort I might to us both, across all that void of space and time: "Then hold your head up all the more, This tide, And every tide; Because he was the son you bore, And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!"

I looked straight up above me, at the photodiode display before my eyes in the viewmask, swallowing hard, to follow the streaming tide of blossoms on the wind, and there was Saturn, old Father Time, hanging in the orange smoke of the sky, an arrow through his heart. I gave him a respectful nod, and raised one gloved thumb in salute.

Peter S. Beagle was born in Manhattan on the same night that Billie Holiday was recording "Strange Fruit" and "Fine and Mellow" just a few blocks away. Raised in the Bronx, Peter originally proclaimed he would be a writer when he was ten years old. Today he is acknowledged as an American fantasy icon, and to the delight of his millions of fans around the world is now publishing more than ever. He is the author of the beloved classic
The Last Unicorn
, as well as the novels
A Fine and Private Place
,
The Innkeeper's Song
, and
Tamsin
. He has won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Mythopoeic awards. His most recent book is the collection
Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle
. Upcoming are two new novels,
I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons
and
Summerlong
, and four short collections featuring new stories about Schmendrick the Magician, unicorns from other cultures, Shakespeare, and his own teenage years in the Bronx.

Darlington was desperately glad to see the little fire as he came over the moor from Bramham.
I can make it that far.
There was less snow on the ground here to betray him with footprints, but the cold was harder because of that, and while his coat could keep the wind off yet awhile, his boot soles had worn as thin as his hopes. He had sent the horse off in a different direction more than an hour ago, but he knew his pursuers too well to imagine that the trick would deceive them for long, if at all. At very best he was buying time; which, Darlington decided, could well be considered the entire story of his life. Wrapping his arms around his own shoulders, he stumbled up the low hill toward the fire.
I think I can make it that far
.

It was reassuring to see that there was only one figure observing his approach. He'd not have expected to encounter any but fleeing, freezing high-tobys like himself on the moor . . . but he had always found the supposed brotherhood of outlaws greatly overrated: none could be trusted after sunset, and few in broad daylight. But even from such a distance the man near the fire was clearly no bandit. He was tall and white-haired—white-bearded as well—and wrapped in a cloak of intriguing design that Darlington determined was coming away with him, should they survive the night. He saw, as well, that the man's face was curiously ageless in the feeble, wavering firelight, with a paradoxical mix of old sadness and equally profound tranquility. It made him nervous, as contradictions always did.

Showing no trepidation on his own part, the white-haired man beckoned Darlington to the fire, saying in a deep, quiet voice, "Warm yourself, good highwayman. I fear the pickings must have been slim on such a day."

Darlington's legs made the decision to sit before he did, and when he tried to speak, no sound at all came out of his mouth. The stranger nodded understandingly, and offered him a leathern flask plainly meant to contain brandy or
schnapps
; but what Darlington tasted was so astonishingly rich and alive inside him that he very nearly threw up, as though his body were trying to vomit out the whole terror of the day. When he was able, he gasped hoarsely, "Thank you. Whatever that was, thank you."

"Nectar of the gods," the stranger responded. "Or as close to it as either of us is ever likely to come. Rest now, and tell me what you will, or rest and be still. Those on your track will surely follow no further until morning, at the earliest. I will find more wood."

Too weary to wonder about anything, Darlington promptly fell asleep, and was only wakened by the increased heat of the revived fire on his face. The stranger offered him another swallow from the flask, and the heel-end of a battered loaf of brown bread. "The last of my provender, forgive me. I was making for Wetherby, more or less, but that's impossible now, in this cold. I may as well turn toward Ilkley—or even Harrogate, why not? Yes . . . perhaps Harrogate."

He was obviously debating an important issue with himself, and Darlington was near drowsing off again; but the unnerving oddity of a man who seemed neither mad nor a beggar knowing him on sight for an outlaw prodded him fully awake against his will. He spoke warily to his benefactor therefore, saying, "Sir, if your kindness is meant but to delay me until the High Sheriff's men have their hands on me, I feel bound to inform you that the pistol under my coat is pointed directly at your charitable heart. Let me be hanged at Leeds Assizes next month, I will at least swing for something grander than a mail coach that turned out to carry nothing but solicitors' accounts and begging letters from the colonies." And he patted his breast meaningfully and smiled what he dearly hoped was his most elegantly menacing smile.

"Roger Darlington, you would be," the stranger mused, smiling back at him. "A good Dalesman's name—I hear it everywhere on the moors lately, though I somehow feel I'll have forgotten it utterly by tomorrow's dawn. Wensleydale, most likely?"

Darlington let his hand fall, the pistol being empty anyway, since the last shot over his shoulder that had killed a trooper's horse. "Aye, born and bred in Skipton myself, but there've been Darlingtons in Wensleydale since the bloody Ark. But you have the advantage of me, sir."

"Ah, my name? Elias Patterson, at your service." The stranger offered his hand across the fire. "Reverend Elias Patterson that was, as you might say."

Accepting the handshake, Darlington frowned in some puzzlement. "You're a minister, then?"

Elias Patterson cocked his head slightly, as though the word were new to him. "Perhaps I am still. It's hard to know, you understand."

Darlington did know, having passed a fair number of entertaining evenings drinking, gambling, whoring and weeping with variously fallen clerics. "A woman, was it?" With this one, it would have to be a woman.

Again the thoughtful tilt of the head, the narrowing of the gray eyes, the least breath of a smile. "In a manner of speaking."

"Well, it's a good man's failing. Not like what I do."

He said it in his most swaggering manner, having once slipped into Lincoln's Inn Fields, with a price already on his head, to see
The Beggar's Opera.
Elias Patterson's eyes were neither impressed nor unsympathetic. "You hold a low opinion of your chosen trade, is it?"

"I never said that." Darlington found himself distinctly irritated with his own irritation. "But I hardly expect it to make me,"—he gestured with his thumb toward the cold black sky "—welcome up there."

"But why not? You work hard, you have so far harmed no one—you see, I know a bit of you, Mr. Darlington—and the worst that can be said is that you have a certain passion for redistributing the doubtless ill-gotten wealth of that class which can afford to ride about in coaches, whether public or privately-owned. As a former man of the cloth, I can tell you honestly that the Savior might very well approve."

There was humor in the voice, but no mockery. Darlington had the alarming sense that the man meant exactly what he was saying. "I redistribute the wealth to
myself
, Reverend Patterson—Robin Hood's a long time gone. Now and then I do toss a coin or two into the poor box or the collection plate, but that's the end of it, believe me." Weary as he was, he leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "What sort of a minister
are
you, anyway?"

Elias Patterson did not reply, being occupied with placing more fallen branches on the fire. They blazed up quickly, sputtering a little because of the snow. He leaned toward the flames himself, his eyes and voice speculative, almost dreamy. "How strange, when you think about it," he mused in a near-whisper. "And we
should
think about it, you and I. A gentleman of the road and a—what?—a preacher who dares not even enter a church, for fear that the very blessed timbers might all come down on his head. Oh, we are indeed well met—one forever in flight, a poor fox, with no faithful vixen, no cubs waiting to warm and welcome him, celebrating him for losing the hounds one more time—"

"And just how would you know that, my wise
Reverend
Patterson?"

"—and the other in fact a hunter, a pursuer, wandering the same mazes over and over, endlessly searching for something he begins to feel he dreamed . . . " The voice dried to a meaningless insect drone.

Born a Dalesman, as Elias Patterson had guessed, Darlington had grown up with the silence of the moors. For him it was a sound in itself: a bleak, deeply elusive music, to be felt along the scalp, and in the soles of the feet, rather than heard with the ears. Tonight, listening intently for hoofbeats, for men's voices calling to each other and the yelping of hounds—suddenly he could not endure the stillness a moment longer. "No matter our need, it's clear that neither of us will be sleeping tonight," he said. "My story is entirely as you imagine it, barring perhaps a trifle more education than most robbers on horseback, and consequently a dream of my own. A dull dream, certainly, for it involves living to retirement and then starting up a good little inn in Whitby or Wensleydale, catering quietly to the profession . . . oh, an extremely dull dream, believe me. I would much prefer to hear any tale told by a minister of the Gospel who fears to walk into a church." Elias Patterson began to protest, but Darlington continued, "We haven't got wood enough to see us through the night. As an earnest of my intent, I promise to gather what we need before you begin. If you will begin."

They regarded each other for a long moment, during which Elias Patterson neither spoke, nor nodded, nor made any other sign to his criminal companion. Then Roger Darlington abruptly stepped away from the fire and set about collecting more branches. Elias Patterson sat motionless, staring into the darkness.

Darlington made three trips, and was sweating heavily despite the cold when he returned with the last armload. He rebuilt the fire entirely, so that it threw just as much heat but burned more slowly. "The one useful thing I learned from taking the King's shilling. I did leave two shillings for him when I deserted, so he can't be
that
annoyed with me."

"A king's bookkeeping is as mysterious as a woman's." Elias Patterson had not moved. "Thank you for the firewood."

Darlington peered sideways at him. "There was a price attached."

"Ah. My story. Are you certain you want to hear it? It is long, unlikely, and remarkably unedifying—shameful, even, to come from a minister's lips. Blasphemous, too, properly regarded."