The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year - Volume Eight (31 page)

The collapse of the damnable branch had the added consequence that now, every morning, a particularly bothersome ray of sunlight tormented the eye of the philosophical and always death-wishing irrigator Daeng, causing uncontrollable screaming fits and severe sleep deprivation. It was not long, therefore, before Daeng nodded off behind the wheel while driving along the main road. He rammed a truck full of pigs on their way to the slaughterhouse, rolled fourteen times and found new joy in life when he realized he had survived the crash without a scratch. Contrary to the pigs. So lugubrious was the scene of the accident – chunks of bloody pork all over the place – that it made the news broadcasts all over Southeast Asia. Even in Singapore, where Om had been working at a Thai restaurant for six years and sending a monthly email to his mourning grandmother Isra, who had no email address. Om then wrote her a letter, saying:
I'm doing fine, Grandmother. I have a Ph.D. in computer and I'm making lots of money now. Here, have some
– and added his tips to the envelope. When Isra found the letter in her mailbox a week later, she died of happiness.

Wishes, wishes, wishes everywhere. The well-mannered crab huntress Kulap found some scrap metal from Daeng's wrecked truck in the rice field and used it to forge a gong. When she sounded it one night, she touched such a probing frequency that every man in Doi Saket was enchanted and lured toward her little house. As soon as the well-bellied weed exterminator Uan saw her, he fell head over heels in love. Kulap, not a bad sort, gave him a cursory embrace, and at least the idea of love.

Wishes, like pearls on a string of cause and effect. Kulap's gong kept chiming across the rice fields for nights on end, finally resonating in the blood supply to Somchai's husband's failing manhood and dislodging something in the veins. He immediately ravaged her with all the lust that had been denied him all these years, and Somchai was engulfed in waves of coital energy that were tangible for miles around – even as far as Chiang Mai, where legs were spread, thighs were kneaded, and orgasms were shrieked out. All over northern Thailand wishes came true. Bonds of love were forged. Children were being born. Kemkhaeng broke his leg.

And maybe this was all coincidence, like so much in life.

But let me tell you that, somewhere, a tiny little light had found its swarm. It let itself drift along on the winds toward the west. All the while, it wished and wished and wished. And so, wishing, the light and its wishes flew toward the edge of the universe and beyond.

* * *

1
Uan means "hugely fat" in Thai – not necessarily an insult.

2
"Turtle"

3
"Real woman"

4
"Red"

5
"Wild goat"

6
"Beanpole"

7
The Thai custom of addressing one another by nicknames is meant to remember oneself better and to fool the spirits into forgetting people's real names. As do the Thai themselves, for that matter. Irrespective of how unflattering the nickname may be, it is freely used in everyday life and no longer necessarily has a traditional origin. The wayward harvester driver Sungkaew, for instance, named his daughter Loli, after Marlboro Lights, and the unemployed mushroom picker Pakpao named her son Ham, after David Beckham. (Until his classmates discovered that in the mountain dialect "Ham" means "sack full of testicles', causing his well-meaning mother, unable to resist his ceaseless badgering, to rename him Porn.)

8
"Tiger"

9
"Watermelon"

10
Wish lanterns made of rice paper with a burning firelighter underneath

11
"About 650 dollars"

12
"Mighty warrior"; the Abbot is the head monk of the temple

13
Small lizards intelligent enough to articulate their own name.

CHERRY BLOSSOMS
ON THE RIVER OF SOULS

Richard Parks

Richard Parks (
www.richard-parks.com
) is the author of novel
The Long Look
and more than 100 short stories, which have appeared in
Asimov's
,
Realms of Fantasy, Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales
, and numerous anthologies, and are collected in
The Ogre's Wife, Worshipping Small Gods, On the Banks of the River of Heaven
, and
Yamada Monogatari: Demon Hunter
. His work has been nominated for both the World Fantasy Award and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature. His second novel,
To Break the Demon Gate
, is due out in the spring of 2014. He is a native of Mississippi, USA, and despite several attempts to leave, still lives there with his wife and a varying number of cats.

T
he tales varied as to
why
the well was outside the village rather than inside. Some say that an earthquake and rockfall destroyed the original town site and the survivors rebuilt the village at a safer distance, leaving the now-dry well where it was. Others say that a saké-addled farmer relieved himself in the well one night, so offending the spirit of the well that it had moved
itself
and had been dry ever since. Whichever version one believed, the well was where it was, and nearly every evening the boy called Hiroshi came to stare down into the darkness, and listen.

The well was full of music.

"Hello," Hiroshi said to the unseen musician, as was his habit. There was no answer. Hiroshi was never quite sure what he would have done had the darkness answered him. There was a spirit in the well, of course. His uncle Saito, the priest, said there were living spirits in everything, and Hiroshi believed that. Still, the darkness did not answer him.

One fine spring evening his uncle Saito walked out of the village to where Hiroshi sat by the well. He had been a soldier and was now a priest, but it was as Hiroshi's uncle that Saito came to speak with Hiroshi that evening. "Greetings, Nephew," he said, and sat down beside the boy.

"Hello, Uncle. Is there something the matter?"

"I'm not certain. I would be grateful if you would help me decide, so I must ask: what is your fascination with this well?"

"Is Father worried? He's raised no objections so long as I do not neglect my obligations."

"My brother is a practical man, and you are a dutiful son to him. However, my question was not to my brother."

Hiroshi blushed. "Forgive me, Uncle. I sit here because I like to listen. There is a sound coming from the well, from down in the darkness. It's almost as if the music is being played just for me; almost as if I've heard it before. I don't understand that, but that's how it feels."

Saito sat down beside him and leaned forward just a bit, listening. After a while he pulled back the sleeve of his robe and picked up a pebble. He dropped it over the side.

"What do you hear now, Hiroshi?"

"I hear the pebble rattling against stones... fading. Now I hear nothing."

"No splash? Not even a small one?"

"No."

Saito nodded. "Nor will you ever. This was a well. Now it is not. Now it is just a hole down deep into the underground. The underground is the province of dead things, and dead things should not concern the living. Look around you now. What do you see?"

Hiroshi did as his uncle directed. He saw children his age flying kites in the waning light, running along the ridges of the flooded rice fields, playing games with tops and hoops, laughing.

"It all seems childish," Hiroshi said.

"Is it inappropriate for children to do childish things? Or the living to do what nature decrees that the living must?
This
is your world, Hiroshi. There is nothing in that well that should be of concern to you. Will you think about what I have said?"

"I will, Uncle," Hiroshi said. His uncle looked back once but not a second time as he walked away.

Hiroshi, being an honest boy, did what he had promised to do. He thought about what his uncle said, and he studied carefully, for a moment or two, the activity, now fading with the day, around him.

"I've played those games," he said to himself. "Time and again. They do not change – the kites pull on the wind as they always have, as they will for anyone. This song is for
me
."

All this was justification, and pointless. The only justification Hiroshi needed was the song he still heard, coming from the depths of the well.

T
he next evening Hiroshi joined his playmates at their games for a time to appease his uncle, but when play time was over and all his friends had gone home, he returned to the well. He moved quickly, with furtive glances all about to see if anyone was there to see. He carried a long rope coiled over one shoulder and a small knife in his sash.

"The rope was a sensible idea, but that blade may not be enough," his uncle said. He sounded sad.

Hiroshi froze as his Uncle Saito stood up from his hiding place behind the well.

"How did you know, Uncle?"

"It serves a priest well to know how to look into a person's eyes and see clearly what plagues them. You are plagued by discontent, Nephew. Unfortunately, unlike other spirits and minor devils, this one bows to no spell of exorcism. You must cast it out yourself."

Hiroshi hung his head. "How do I do this, Uncle?"

"Perhaps by doing what you want. I still advise against it, but this devil shows no sign of leaving you." Saito took the rope from Hiroshi's shoulder and made one end fast to a post beside the stone rail marking the well. He threw the other end down into the blackness. "Do you still hear music, Nephew?"

Hiroshi listened for a moment. "Yes, Uncle. I do."

"Then follow it down and satisfy your devil. Then perhaps he will leave and you will come back to us. I hope so, else I must explain your absence to your father, and I would rather avoid that duty."

Hiroshi put his hand on the rope. He stared into the forbidding blackness as he often had, but he barely hesitated. "I will come back, Uncle. I promise."

"Do not promise. I merely ask that you be careful. Powerful
kami
are drawn to such places, and most are not likely to be friendly to you. Take this." Saito held up the shorter of the two swords he'd carried as a soldier. "Remember what little I taught you of the Way of the Gods. Most of all, remember who you are. I think that is the important thing, no matter where a person may go."

Hiroshi took a deep breath and climbed over the side of the well. The last thing he saw before darkness closed in was his uncle peering sadly down at him from a circle of daylight.

That daylight quickly faded as the well shaft made an abrupt turn at the bottom into what looked like an ordinary cave.

Hiroshi listened very closely, but now he didn't hear the music at all.

"That's very strange. It was a most persistent sound when I heard it from the side of the well. Persuasive, I think," he said, though Hiroshi still couldn't fit words to what the argument was supposed to be.

Now all was silent except for a faint rush of air, as if the winds of the underground could not wait to escape past him and up the well to sunlight. Hiroshi's hair blew about his face and tickled his forehead. The scent carried by the wind was of damp and mold, and a faint hint of a spice that Hiroshi could not identify at all.

There was darkness about, as he had expected. Indeed, he'd brought a small lantern along but found he didn't need it. Once his eyes adjusted, there was light there, of a sort. He could make out where to walk, where boulders lay in his path and where not. The only thing left to do was to choose which direction to go.

Where is the music?

He listened very intently, trying to hear around the moan of the wind in his ears. There had been a promise in that music, something wonderful beyond Hiroshi's imagining. Familiar, too, though he could not say how.

After a few moments he thought he heard it again. He wasn't sure. He wondered if there had been a concentrating effect from the well itself, like wind through a reed flute; the music was much harder to hear this much closer, presumably, to the musician. Hiroshi finally took his best guess and started walking.

He soon came to what had clearly been part of the underground river, now dry and full of stones. An old woman was waiting for him there, looking impatient. At least, Hiroshi thought it was an old woman; that was what he told himself when he saw her. She was more a collection of rags and bones than anything, but there was a face, and wrinkles, and a thin toothless grin.

"Give me those!" she said. Her voice was like dead leaves blowing across stones and her eyes glittered like black pebbles.

Hiroshi blinked. "Those? Those what?"

"Clothes! Give them to me!"

Hiroshi thought this very rude, but he was more confused than offended. "Who are you and why do you want my clothes?"

She ignored that. "You must give your clothes to me before you cross this river. Now!"

Apparently, to the old woman now meant
now
. She reached out with one clawed hand, snatching at his sleeve. She managed to tear off a strip of his sleeve and gouge a line of red across his wrist.

Hiroshi took a step back. "Here, now, Grandmother! Stop that!"

She stopped for a moment, but she was looking at the blood on Hiroshi's wrist. "You're alive!" It sounded like an accusation.

"Of course I'm alive! What did you think?"

"That you were not, of course. Now I think you're a fool." She blinked, and for a moment Hiroshi saw some kind of recognition there, something beyond the cold darkness he had seen before. It didn't last. The cold, relentless stare returned. "Clothes. You don't need them. Not where you are, not where you are going.
Mine!"