The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four (20 page)

"What's horrible about them? Come along and tell me." And he took me right close and made me examine their hairlessness and look into their empty eyes, and touch them, even. Their skin was without print or prickle, slippery as a green river stone. "See?" said Pa. "There's nothing to them, is there?"

"Little girl!" a woman had called from among the dead. "So sweet!"

My father reached into the crowd and pulled her out by her arm. "Did you not drink all your drink, madam?" he said severely.

She made a face. "It tasted foul." Then she turned and beamed upon me. "What lovely hair you have! Ah, youth!"

Which I don't. I have thick, brown, straight hair, chopped off as short as Ma will let me—and sometimes shorter when it really gives me the growls.

My dad had put me down and gone for a cup. He made the woman drink the lot, in spite of her faces and gagging. "Do you want to suffer?" he said. "Do you want to feel everything and scream with pain? There's a lot of fire to walk through, you know, on the way to the Blessed Place."

"I'm suffering now," she said, but vaguely, and by the time she finished the cup I was no longer visible to her—nothing was. She went in among the others and swayed there like a tall, thin plant among plants. And I've never feared them since, the dead. My fear dried up out of me, watching that woman's self go.

Here comes Pa now, striding up the slope away from the line of dead. "How's my miss, this noontide? How's my Scowling Sarah?"

Some say my dad is ugly. I say, his kind of work would turn anyone ugly, all the gloom and doom of it. And anyway, I don't care—my dad is my dad. He can be ugly as a sackful of bumholes and still I'll love him.

Right now his hunger buzzes about him like a cloud of blowflies. "Here." I slip the carry-cloth off my shoulder. "And there's two fat pigeon for supper, in a pie."

"Two fat pigeon in one fat pie? You set a wicked snare, Sharon Armstrong."

"You look buggered." I sit on the moss beside him. "And that's a long queue. Want some help, after?"

"If you would, my angel."
Donk,
says the cork out of the bottle. Pa's face and neck and forearms are all brown wrinkled leather.

He works his way through a bunnock, then the meat, the cheese, the second bun. He's neat and methodical from first bite to last sup of the lemon.

When he's done, he goes off a way and turns his back to pee into the lemon bottle, for you can't leave your earthly wastes down here or they'll sully the waters. He brings it back corked and wrapped and tucks it into the carry-cloth next to a rock on the slope. "Well, then."

I scramble up from the thick dry moss and we set off down the springy slope to the river.

A couple of hours in, I'm getting bored. I've been checking the arrivals, sending off the ones without coin and taking the coin from under those tongues that have it, giving the paid ones their drink and checking there's nothing in their eyes, no hope or thought or anything, and keeping them neat in their groups with my stick and my voice. Pa has rowed hard, across and back, across and back. He's nearly to the end of the queue. Maybe I can go up home now?

But in his hurry Pa has splashed some tears onto the deck. As he steps back to let the next group of the dead file aboard, he slips on that wetness, and disappears over the side, into the woeful river, so quickly he doesn't have time to shout.

"Pa!" I push my way through the slippery dead. "No!"

He comes up spluttering. Most of his hair has washed away.

"Thank God!" I grab his hot, wet wrist. "I thought you were dead and drowned!"

"Oh, I'm dead all right," he says.

I pull him up out of the river. The tears and the fire have eaten his clothes to rags and slicked the hairs to his body. He looks almost like one of
them
. "Oh, Pa! Oh, Pa!"

"Calm yourself, daughter. There's nothing to be done."

"But look at you, Pa! You walk and talk. You're more yourself than any of these are theirs." I'm trying to get his rags decent across his front, over his terrible bald willy.

"I must go upstairs to die properly." He takes his hands from his head and looks at the sloughed-off hairs on them. "Oh Sharon, always remember this! A moment's carelessness is all it takes."

I fling myself at him and sob. He's slimed with dissolving skin, and barely warm, and he has no heartbeat.

He lays his hand on my head and I let go of him. His face, even without hair, is the same ugly, loving face; his eyes are the same eyes. "Come." He leads the way off the punt. "It doesn't do to delay these things."

I follow him, pausing only to pick up the carry-cloth in my shaking arms. "Can you not stay down here, where we can visit you and be with you? You're very like your earthly form. Even with the hair gone—"

"What, you'd have me wander the banks of Cocytus forever?"

"Not forever. Just until—I don't know. Just not now, just not to lose you altogether."

His hand is sticky on my cheek. "No, lovely. I must get myself coined and buried and do the thing properly. You of all people would know that."

"But, Pa!—"

He lays a slimy finger on my lips. "It's my time, Sharon," he says into my spilling eyes. "And I will take my love of you and your mother with me, into all eternity; you know that."

I know it's not true, and so does he. How many dead have we seen, drinking all memory to nowhere? But I wipe away my tears and follow him.

We start up the stairs, and soon it's dark. He isn't breathing; all I can hear is the sound of his feet on the stone steps, which is unbearable, like someone tonguing chewed food in an open mouth.

He must have heard my thoughts. "Sing me something, Scowling Sarah. Sing me that autumn song, with all the wind and the birds in it."

Which I'm glad to do, to cover the dead-feet sounds and to pretend we're not here like this, to push aside my fear of what's to come, to keep my own feet moving from step to step.

We follow the echoes up and up, and when I reach the end of the song, "Beautiful," he says. "Let's have that again from the very start."

So I sing it again. I have to break off, though, near to the end. The trapdoor is above us, leaking light around its edges.

"Oh, my pa!" I hold his terrible flesh and cry. "Don't come up! Just stay here on the stair! I will bring you your food and your drink. We can come down and sit with you. We will
have
you, at least—"

"Go on, now." He plucks my arms from his neck, from his waist, from his neck again. "Fetch your mother for me."

"Just, even—" My mind is floating out of my head like smoke. "Even if you could stay for the pigeon! For the pie! Just that little while! I will bring it down to you, on the platter—"

"What's all this noise?" The trapdoor opens. Ma gives a shout of fright seeing Pa, and yes, in the cooler earthly light his face is—well, it is clear that he is dead.

"Forgive me, wife," says his pale, wet mouth. His teeth show through his cheeks, and his eyes are unsteady in his shiny head. "I have gone and killed myself, and it is no one's fault but my own." He has no breath, as I said. The voice, I can hear in this realer air, comes from somewhere else than his lungs, somewhere else, perhaps, than his body completely.

Ma kneels slowly and reaches, slowly, into the top of the stair.

"Charence Armstrong," she weeps at him, her voice soft and unbelieving, "how could you do this?"

"He fell in the Acheron, Ma; he slipped and fell!"

"How could you be so stupid?" she tells him gently, searching the mess for the face she loves. "Come to me."

"As soon as I step up there I am dead," he says. "You must come down to me, sweet wife, and make your farewells."

There's hardly the room for it, but down she comes onto the stairs, her face so angry and intense it frightens me. And then they are like the youngest of lovers in the first fire of love, kissing, kissing, holding each other tight as if they'd crush together into one. She doesn't seem to mind the slime, the baldness of him, the visibility of his bones. The ragged crying all around us in the hole, that is me; these two are silent in their cleaving. I lean and howl against them and at last they take me in, lock me in with them.

Finally we untangle ourselves, three wrecks of persons on the stairs. "Come, then," says my father. "There is nothing for it."

"Ah, my husband!" whispers Ma, stroking his transparent cheeks.

All the workings move under the jellified skin. "Bury me with all the rites," he says. "And use real coin, not token."

"As if she would use token!" I say.

He kisses me, wetly upon all the wet. "I know, little scowler. Go on up, now."

When he follows us out of the hole, it's as if he's rising through a still water-surface. It paints him back onto himself, gives him back his hair and his clothes and his color. For a few flying moments he's alive and bright, returned to us.

But as his heart passes the rim, he stumbles. His face closes. He slumps to one side, and now he is gone, a dead man taken as he climbed from his cellar, a dead man fallen to his cottage floor.

We weep and wail over him a long time.

Then, "Take his head, daughter." Ma climbs back down into the hole. "I will lift his dear body from here."

The day after the burial, he walks into sight around the red hill in company with several other dead.

"Pa!" I start towards him.

He smiles bleakly, spits the obolus into his hand and gives it to me as soon as I reach him. I was going to hug him, but it seems he doesn't want me to.

"That brother of mine, Gilles," he says. "He can't hold his liquor."

"Gilles was just upset that you were gone so young." I fall into step beside him.

He shakes his bald head. "Discourage your mother from him; he has ideas on her. And he's more handsome than I was. But he's feckless; he'll do neither of you any good."

"All right." I look miserably at the coins in my hand. I can't tell which is Pa's, now.

"In a moment it won't matter." He puts his spongy hand on my shoulder. "But for now, I'm counting on you, Sharon. You look after her for me."

I nod and blink.

"Now, fetch us our cups, daughter. These people are thirsty and weary of life."

I bring the little black cups on the tray. "Here, you must drink this," I say to the dead. "So that the fire won't hurt you."

My father, of course, doesn't need to be told. He drinks all the Lethe-water in a single swallow, puts down the cup and smacks his wet chest as he used to after a swig of apple-brandy. Up comes a burp of flowery air, and the spark dies out of his eyes.

I guide all the waiting dead onto the punt. I flick the heavy mooring-rope off the bollard and we slide out into the current, over the pure clear tears-water braided with fine flames. The red sky is cavernous; the cable dips into the flow behind us and lifts out ahead, dripping flame and water. I take up the pole and push it into the riverbed, pushing us along, me and my boatload of shades, me and what's left of my pa. My solid arms work, my lungs grab the hot air, my juicy heart pumps and pumps. I never realized, all the years my father did this, what solitary work it is.

Ellen Kushner was born in Washington, D.C. and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. She attended Bryn Mawr College and graduated from Barnard College. Her first novel,
Swordspoint: A Melodrama of Manners
, introduced the fantasy world Riverside, to which she has since returned in
The Fall of the Kings
(written with Delia Sherman),
The Privilege of the Sword
, and several short stories, including the one that follows. Her second novel,
Thomas the Rhymer
, won the Mythopoeic Award and the World Fantasy Award. Kushner is also the editor of
Basilisk
and
The Horns of Elfland
(co-edited with Don Keller and Delia Sherman), and has taught writing at the Clarion and Odyssey workshops. Upcoming is an anthology of "Bordertown" stories co-edited with Holly Black. Kushner lives in Manhattan, on Riverside Drive, with her partner, the author and editor Delia Sherman.

"He's dead, mother."

"Who's dead, Richard?"

His mother did not look up from rolling out her pastry. They lived in the country; things died. And her son did not seem particularly upset. But then, he seldom did. She was raising him not to be afraid of anything if she could help it.

"The man in the orchard."

Octavia St. Vier carefully put down her rolling pin, wiped her hands on her apron, and tucked up her skirts. At the door she slipped into her wooden clogs, because it was spring and the ground was still muddy. The boy followed her out to the orchard, where a man lay still as the grave under an apple tree, his hands clutching tight at something on his chest.

"Oh, love, he's not dead."

"He smells dead," said her son.

Octavia chuckled. "He does that. He's dead drunk, is all, and old and probably sick. He's got good boots, but they're all worn out, see? He must have come a long way."

"What's he holding?" Before she could think to stop him, her son reached between the old man's hands to tug at the end of what he clutched in the folds of his messy cloak.

Like a corpse in a comedy, the old man sat suddenly bolt upright, still gripping one end of the long pointed object whose other end was in her son's hands. It was the end of a sword, sheathed in cracked leather. Octavia was not usually a screamer, but she screamed.

"Rarrrrrr," the old man growled furiously. It seemed to be all he could manage at the moment, but his meaning was clear.

"Richard," Octavia said, as carefully as if she were back at her girlhood elocution lessons—though this was not the sort of sentence they had been designed for—"put the man's sword down."

She could tell her son didn't want to. His hand was closed around the pommel, encircled itself by a swirl of metal which no doubt had its own special name as well. It was a beautiful object; its function was clearly to keep anything outside from touching the hand within.