Frost and Fire Page 16

  “Yes,” I replied.

  He laughed.

  “Of course you have to say that.”

  “Of course.”

  “Let’s get on with it.”

  He raised the blade of darkness high above his head and an unearthly silence poured across the land.

  “Ashtaroth, Beelzebub, Asmodeus, Belial, Leviathan … ,” he began.

  I raised my own weapon.

  “Newton, Descartes, Faraday, Maxwell, Fermi … ,” I said.

  “Lucifer Rofocale,” he intoned, “Hecate, Behemoth, Put Satanas, Ariaston …”

  “Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rodin, Maillol, Moore…,” I continued.

  The world seemed to swim about us, and this place was suddenly outside of space and time.

  “Mephisto!” he cried out. “Legion! Lilith! Ianoda! Eblis!”

  “Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes,” I went on.

  He struck and I parried the blow and struck one of my own to be parried in turn myself. He continued his chanting and increased the tempo of his attack. I did the same.

  After the first several minutes I could see that we were still fairly evenly matched. That meant it would drag on, and on. I tried some tricks I had almost forgotten I knew.

  But he remembered. He had a few, too, but something in me recalled them also.

  We began to move even faster.

  The blows seemed to come from every direction, but my blade was there, ready for them when they fell. His had a way of doing the same thing. It became a dance within a cage of shifting metal, row upon row of glowing eyes staring at us across the field of the dead. Vic and Sabrina stood side by side yet seemed oblivious of each other in their concentration upon the conflict.

  I hate to say that it was exhilarating, but it was. Finally, to face once again the embodiment of everything I had fought across the years. To have total victory suddenly lie but a stroke away, if but the right stroke might be found …

  I redoubled my efforts and actually bore him back several paces. But he recovered quickly and stood his ground then. A sigh rose up from beyond the monuments.

  “You can still surprise me,” he muttered through clenched teeth, slashing back with a deadly attack of his own. “When will this ever end?”

  “How’s a legend to know?” I replied, giving ground and striking again.

  Our blades fed us the forces we had come to represent and we fought on, and on.

  He came close, very close, on several occasions. But each time I was able to spin away at the last moment and counterattack. Twice, I thought that I had him and each time he narrowly avoided me and came on with renewed vigor.

  He cursed, he laughed, and I probably did the same. The moon dropped down and sparklets of dew became visible upon the grass. The creatures sometimes shifted about, but their eyes never left us. Vic and Sabrina exchanged several whispered conversations without looking at each other.

  I swung a head-cut, but he parried and riposted to my chest. I stopped it and tried for his chest, but he parried …

  A breeze sprang up and the perspiration on my brow seemed suddenly cooler. I slipped once on the damp ground and he failed to take advantage of my imbalance. Was he finally tiring?

  I tried pressing him once more, and he seemed a bit slower. Was I now gaining an edge or was it a trick on his part, to lull me?

  I nicked his biceps. The barest touch. A scratch. Nothing real in the way of an injury, but I felt my confidence rising. I tried again, mustering all of my speed in a fresh burst of enthusiasm.

  A bright line appeared across his shirtfront.

  He cursed again and swung wildly. As I parried it, I realized that the sky was lightening in the east. That meant I had to hurry. There are rules by which even we are bound.

  I spun through my most elaborate attack yet, but he was able to stop it. I tried again, and again. Each time he seemed weaker, and on that last one I had seen a look of pain upon his face. A restlessness came over our gallery then, and I felt that the final sands were about to descend the hourglass.

  I struck again, and this time I connected solidly. I felt the edge of my weapon grate against bone as it cut into his left shoulder.

  He howled and dropped to his knees as I drew back for the death blow.

  In the distance a cock crowed, and I heard him laugh.

  “Close, brother! Close! But not good enough,” he said. “Sabrina! To me! Now!”

  She took a step toward him, turned toward Vic, then back to my fallen nemesis. She rushed to him and embraced him as he began to fade.

  “Aufwiedersehen.” he called to me, and they both were gone.

  With a great rustling rush then, like blown leaves, our audience departed, flapping through the sky, flashing along the ground, slithering into holes, as the sun cut its way above the horizon.

  I leaned upon my blade. In a little while Vic came up to me.

  “Will we ever see them again?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  I began walking toward what I saw to be the distant gate.

  “Now what?” he said.

  “I’m going home and get a good day’s sleep,” I told him. “Might even take a little vacation. Business is going to be slow for a while.”

  We crossed the hallowed earth and exited onto a sidestreet.

  QUESTS END

  I don’t really feel like quoting from The Masks of God, Hamlet’s Mill, The Golden Bough, and Beyond the Pleasure Principle in introducing a story slightly over a thousand words in length. If a book is a machine to think with, though, these are some of the machines I keep running in a back room in the factory of my intellect, and at some time or other everything gets passed through them. Some things get ground away to nothing, some get stuck among the gear teeth, others get turned into stories like this.

  * * *

  The deed is done. And done pretty well, I might add. The princess lies dead on the floor of my cave, amid the strewn bones of centuries’ worth of heroes, wizards, princes, princesses, dwarfs, and elves, and the fragments of nine broken swords committed to their task— another possible reign of sweetness and joy I’ve clipped before its bud might unfold.

  I run the rasps of my tongue across my fangs, savoring the acrid taste.

  The last hero is twisted at an impossible angle in the corner, his magic blade shattered. It was the tenth and final one of that brood of evil piercers forged an age ago by the minions of Light to account for my master and those such as myself who serve him. How delicious! The ring I guard remains in the jeweled cask within the niche at my back.

  Pieces of their faithful dwarf companion are strewn along the passageway. I can see the small hand that still holds the ax. Had the little man actually thought he could reach me or do me harm with that pathetic weapon?

  Only the old wizard still draws breath. But I have shattered his staff and scattered his power down ways of darkness. I have granted him a few moments more that I might mock him and see him die cursing the powers he had served.

  “Do you hear me, Lortan?” I ask.

  “Yes, Bactor,” he answers weakly from where he fell, his back against the wall to my left, legs thrust at crazy angles. Then “Why do I still live?” he asks.

  “For a bit of terminal amusement, wearer of the Light. If you will curse all that is good and beautiful and true and noble, I will give you a quick death.”

  “No thanks,” he answers.

  “Why not? You have failed, as did the nine before you. You were the last. It is over. The good guys lose, ten to nothing.”

  He does not respond, so I goad him further: “And your hero—Eric Broadthew, or whatever you call him— didn’t even touch me with that weapon. The last one at least caught me a good one across the shoulder before I dismembered him.”

  “We were the worst of the lot you faced?” he inquires.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t go that far,” I say. “But you were hardly the best.”

  “Humor a defeated old man and tell me. Who w
as the best?”

  I chuckle. “Easily done,” I answer. “Gloring, of the Second Kingdom. He came so close to killing me that it was beautiful. The arc of his blade, Dammer, came down like a bolt from the heavens. The muscles of his arms rippled like the tides of the sea. He glowed with the sweat of his exertions. He cursed me so wondrously, it was like a poem. I stood transfixed. Barely, only barely did I stop him, and it took all of my dark magic rather than the strength of my body. Verily, it was Gloring and Dammerung who were the greatest.”

  “Alas, poor Eric could not beat an act like that.”

  “No, nor any other I have encountered. And now my lord Glaum’s reign will never end, for the Darkness has vanquished the Light. There are no more to be raised up against us.”

  “Of the broken weapons that I see on the floor,” he says, “tell me which is the blade Dammer and where the bones of Gloring lie, that I might see where our brightest hope fell.”

  “You talk too much, old man. It is time to end this conversation.”

  “But I see only nine hilts amid the ruin.”

  I extend my claws and rear to strike him. But he holds me, by no magic but by a single statement:

  “You have not yet won.”

  “How can you say that, when you are the last?”

  “You lied,” he continues, “when you said that your lord’s reign will never end, that the Darkness has vanquished the Light. You do not see your own weakness.”

  “I have no weakness, wizard.”

  Through the gloom I see his smile.

  “Very well,” I say then. “You do not have to curse goodness, truth, beauty, and nobility as the price of a quick death. Just tell me of the weakness that you see.”

  “I have always considered the benefits of a quick death to be somewhat marginal,” he replies.

  “Tell me, that I may protect myself against its exploitation.”

  The insolent old man has the audacity to laugh. I resolve to make his death a slow thing, regardless.

  “I will tell you,” he says, “and you will still be unable to guard against it. I see now that you will die when you know love.”

  I stamp my foot and roar.

  “Love? Love? Your mind is as broken as the rest of you, to accuse me of such a foul failing! Love!”

  My laughter rings about the cave as I decapitate him and roll his head back along the passageway, slinging it by the beard. My sides ache from the strain of laughing.

  After a time I pick up someone’s leg and begin munching on it. Rather tough. Must have been the hero’s.

  My lord Glaum, always and future ruler of the world, enters that evening wearing his defiled garment of Light, to admire my work, to congratulate me on ages well spent. He gives me a cunningly wrought timepiece of gold with my name engraved upon it, to reward my faithful service.

  “Bactor, my lovely,” he asks after a time, “why is it that I behold the remains of only nine of the weapons of Light when all of the heroes have fallen?”

  I chuckle. “There are only nine here.” I explain. “The other is up that side corridor. That hero made a different entrance than the others, and I stopped him there. He was a cunning one.”

  “I wish to see it for myself.”

  “Of course, my lord. Follow me.”

  I lead him up the sideway. I hear him draw a breath as I halt before the niche.

  “This one is whole!” he hisses. “The man stands intact, the blade unbroken!”

  I laugh again. “But harmless, lord. Now and forever. This one I bound by magic, rather than rending him with the strength of my body. I come here to admire him on occasion. He is the best. He came very close to destroying me.”

  “Fool!” he cries. “A spell can be broken! And I see that it is Gloring and Dammerung! We must finish them now to assure our triumph!”

  He reaches for the death wand in its case upon his belt.

  I turn again and regard the point of that blade I had halted but an inch from my breast when my spell froze all motion and left its grinning wielder a statue of judgment and execution forever delayed. Dammerung’s edge is finer than that of any leaf, its point the nearest approach that matter might make to infinity… .

  I hear my master: “Move away, Bactor.”

  And I hear another voice—my own—shout the words that break the spell. The delicious thrust is completed, after millennia of delay.

  Then it slides from me in a fountain of my body’s juices, and I fall backward.

  As the beautiful thing, dripping my life, is turned against Glaum, I glance at its wielder, at the whiteness of his lovely face, teeth clenched within its grin …

  24 VIEWS OF MT. FUJI BY HOKUSAI

  I recall mentioning in a letter to my friend Carl Yoke something concerning the appearance of the mountains behind my home and my having realized but recently that seeing them in a different aspect every season, every day — every time I look at them, actually—had a lot to do with the following story; and that my coming across the book of Hokusai’s prints which gets mentioned in the text of this tale was only the proximate cause of its composition. Without my mountains there would have been no meditations, no story, no Hugo (this one accepted by Shawna McCarthy, brought back to New Mexico and delivered by Parris — thanks, Shawna; thanks, Parris). I can’t cite all of the lesser, contributory kami here. Everything goes back to the mountains. And without Fuji’s fire to complement the frost of my first story, I’d have had to look for a different title for this book. Thanks, Thermodynamics.

  * * *

  1. Mt. Fuji from Owari

  Kit lives, though he is buried not far from here; I and I am dead, though I watch the days-end light pinking cloudstreaks above the mountain in the distance, a tree in the foreground for suitable contrast. The old barrel-man is dust; his cask, too, I daresay. Kit said that he loved me and I said I loved him. We were both telling the truth. But love can mean many things. It can be an instrument of aggression or a function of disease.

  My name is Mari. I do not know whether my life will fit the forms I move to meet on this pilgrimage. Nor death. Not that tidiness becomes me. So begin anywhere. Either arcing of the circle, like that vanished barrel’s hoop, should lead to the same place. I have come to kill. I bear the hidden death, to cast against the secret life. Both are intolerable. I have weighed them. If I were an outsider I do not know which I would choose. But I am here, me, Mari, following the magic footsteps. Each moment is entire, though each requires its past. I do not understand causes, only sequences. And I am long weary of reality-reversal games. Things will have to grow clearer with each successive layer of my journey, and like the delicate play of light upon my magic mountain they must change. I must die a little and live a little each moment.

  I begin here because we lived near here. I visited the place earlier. It is, of course, changed. I recall his hand upon my arm, his sometime smiling face, his stacks of books, the cold, flat eye of his computer terminal, his hands again, positioned in meditation, his smile different then. Distant and near. His hands, upon me. The power of his programs, to crack codes, to build them. His hands. Deadly. Who would have thought he would surrender those rapid-striking weapons, delicate instruments, twisters of bodies? Or myself? Paths … Hands …

  I have come back. It is all. I do not know whether it is enough.

  The old barrel-maker within the hoop of his labor … Half-full, half-empty, half-active, half-passive … Shall I make a yin-yang of that famous print? Shall I let it stand for Kit and myself? Shall I view it as the great Zero? Or as infinity? Or is all of this too obvious? One of those observations best left unstated? I am not always subtle. Let it stand. Fuji stands within it. And is it not Fuji one must climb to give an accounting of one’s life before God or the gods?

  I have no intention of climbing Fuji and accounting for myself, to God or to anything else. Only the insecure and the uncertain require justification. I do what I must. If the deities have any questions they can come down from Fuji and ask
me. Otherwise, this is the closest commerce between us. That which transcends should only be admired from afar.

  Indeed. I of all people should know this. I, who have tasted transcendence. I know, too, that death is the only god who comes when you call.

  Traditionally, the henro —the pilgrim— would dress all in white. I do not. White does not become me, and my pilgrimage is a private thing, a secret thing, for so long as I can keep it so. I wear a red blouse today and a light khaki jacket and slacks, tough leather hiking shoes; I have bound my hair; a pack on my back holds my belongings. I do carry a stick, however, partly for the purpose of support, which I require upon occasion; partly, too, as a weapon should the need arise. I am adept at its use in both these functions. A staff is also said to symbolize one’s faith in a pilgrimage. Faith is beyond me. I will settle for hope.

  In the pocket of my jacket is a small book containing reproductions of twenty-four of Hokusai’s forty-six prints of Mt. Fuji. It was a gift, long ago. Tradition also stands against a pilgrim’s traveling alone, for practical purposes of safety as well as for companionship. The spirit of Hokusai, then, is my companion, for surely it resides in the places I would visit if it resides anywhere. There is no other companion I would desire at the moment, and what is a Japanese drama without a ghost?

  Having viewed this scene and thought my thoughts and felt my feelings, I have begun. I have lived a little, I have died a little. My way will not be entirely on foot. But much of it will be. There are certain things I must avoid in this journey of greetings and farewells. Simplicity is my cloak of darkness, and perhaps the walking will be good for me.

  I must watch my health.

  2. Mt. Fuji from a Teahouse at Yoshida

  I study the print: A soft blueness to the dawn sky, Fuji to the left, seen through the teahouse window by two women; other bowed, drowsing figures like puppets on a shelf… .

  It is not this way here, now. They are gone, like the barrel-maker—the people, the teahouse, that dawn. Only the mountain and the print remain of the moment. But that is enough.