The Darrell Schweitzer MEGAPACK ®. Darrell Schweitzer

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СКАЧАТЬ came the voice from within. They entered, and saw Talnaco seated at his workbench, polishing a lantern. He looked older and more tired than Venda had ever seen him before.

      “Father, you are in a dream.”

      His father smiled and said gently, “You are a true son. I am glad that you care about me.”

      “None of this is real,” the priest said, gesturing with a sweep of his hand.

      “Do you think I don’t know that? I have lived out my life suspended in a single, golden moment of time. It doesn’t make any difference. Mirithemne is with me.”

      He glanced at the empty air as if he were looking at someone.

      “This thing you think is your beloved,” the priest said, “is in truth some spirit or Power, some fragment of the Goddess which has entered your mind through the lantern, like a moth drawn to a random flame. It is without form or intelligence. Your longing gives it a certain semblance of a shape, but it loves you no more than do the wind and the rain.”

      “Perhaps I am in love with the mere memory of being in love. Perhaps…in my memory now, I remember two lives. In one my wife was called Kachelle, in the other Mirithemne. In both, I had a son, Venda. Both are in my memory now. How shall I weigh them and know which is the more true?”

      Venda looked helplessly at the priest, whose face was expressionless.

      “I am tired,” said Talnaco Ramat. He rose, taking the lantern, and walked slowly out of the room. The light was very faint now. They followed him to the courtyard. By the time he set the lantern down on the bench, the light had gone out.

      The priest snapped the metal door shut. Then he and Venda led Talnaco home. He was delirious with fever.

      “He is burned by the spirit,” the priest said. “There is little we can do.”

      They sat by Talnaco’s bedside, as he lay dying. Venda wept. Toward the very end, the old man was lucid.

      “Do not weep, son,” he said. “I have known great happiness in both of my lives.”

      “Father, was there ever someone called Mirithemne, or did you imagine her?”

      “She is real enough. She’s probably old and ugly now. I don’t think she ever knew my name.”

      Venda wept.

      At the very end, his father said, “I have found the greatest treasure. It was worth the struggle.”

      Venda did not answer, but the priest leaned forward, and whispered, “What is it?”

      “A smile. A touch. Whirling leaves. A single moment frozen in time.”

      THE STORY OF A DADAR

      It was in the time of the death of the Goddess that the thing happened, when the Earth rolled wildly in the dark spaces without any hand to guide it, or so the poets tell us, when Dark Powers and Bright drifted across the land, and all things were in disorder.

      It was also in the open grasslands that it happened, beyond the end of the forests, where you can walk for three days due south and come to the frontier of Randelcainé. All was strange to me. I had never been there before, where not a tree was to be seen, anymore than I had been to a place where there are no stars. All that afternoon, my wife Tamda and I drove our wagon through the familiar woods. Slowly the trees began to seem farther apart, and there was more underbrush. I remember how the heat of the day faded quite quickly, and the long, red rays of the setting sun filtered between the trunks, almost parallel to the ground, giving the undersides of the leaves a final burst of color before twilight came on. The trees ahead of us stood in silhouette like black pillars, those behind us, in glory. Above, little birds and winged lizards fluttered in the branches. I reflected that these things had always been thus, even in the earliest times, when the great cities of the Earth’s mightier days stood new and shining, and other gods and goddesses, the predecessors of the one which had just died, ruled the sky. Those ancients could just as well have been seeing this sunset and this forest through my eyes.

      Then a wagon wheel sank axle-deep in mud, and I didn’t have time to reflect on anything. The two of us struggled and gasped in pained breaths that we weren’t young anymore. If only our son were still with us.… But he had gone away to serve the Religion. What is religion when your wheel is stuck?

      When at last the wagon rolled free, stars peered down between the branches. The night air seemed very cold. We sat still, panting, until Tamda had the good sense to get our cloaks, lest the chill get into us.

      So it was that we emerged from the forest in darkness. At first I was hardly aware that there were no more trees. It seemed merely that there were more stars, but then the moon came up and revealed the vast dark carpet of the plain rising and falling before us. Imagine a fish, which had always inhabited the dark and narrow crags among the rocks at the bottom of the sea, suddenly rising up, into the open wonder of the sea itself. So it was. Overhead the Autumn Hunter was high in the sky. The Polar Dragon turned behind us, and the Harpist was rising. By these signs we knew our way. Neither of us wanted to stop for the night. I suppose plainsmen feel the same way, their first night in the forest. So we pushed on and shortly before dawn reached our destination.

      The village glowed on the plain like a beast with a thousand eyes, reclining there, alive with torches. We would never have found it otherwise. The houses were all curving humps of sod, hollowed out and walled with logs. Had they not been lit, we would have passed them in the night, thinking them little hills.

      We were expected. Everyone was awake and waiting. A man in a plumed helmet took our horse by the bridle and led us to a building larger than all the others.

      “Are you Pandiphar Nen?” asked the chieftain who stood at the door.

      “Yes. You sent for me,” I said. “You understand, then, that I do not heal broken bones, or cure any sickness which can be cured with a herb or a little spell?”

      “Yes, I do, or I would not have sent for you.”

      “The price is high.”

      “Please, bargain later. It is my daughter, sore afflicted. She has…left us. Her mind is in darkness, far underground.”

      Tamda and I climbed down from the wagon seat. I got my bag out of the back. We were shown inside. The house had but one room, and a fire burned in the middle floor. The smoke hole wasn’t large enough, and the air was thick. On a pile of hides to one side a maiden lay, her eyes open, but her gaze distracted. She did not seem aware of us. She rolled her head and muttered to herself. I listened for a moment, catching a few words, but most of it was strange to me.

      “Put the fire—out,” I said to those who had come in with us.

      “And leave us alone.” This was done. I waited for the smoke to clear.

      Then I made a mixture of the ground root of the death tree, the water of life, common flour to hold it all together, plus other ingredients, including something called Agda’s Toe. Agda was my master, to whom I had been apprenticed when I was fifteen, some thirty years before. Then I had believed he had an infinite supply of toes, which could be regrown whenever he cut them off and sold them to pharmacies all over the world, but of late I had had my doubts. He never took off his shoes in public.

      I ate СКАЧАТЬ