Alyx - Joanna Russ Page 6

  She picked it up and held it out to him, thinking:

  Not metal, very light. And warm. A toy? Wouldn't break, though. Must be some sort of small machine, though God knows who made it and of what. It follows thoughts! Marvelous. But magic? Bah! Never believed in it before; why now? Besides, this thing too sensible; magic is elaborate, undependable, useless. I’ll tell him—but then it occurred to her that someone had gone to a good deal of trouble to impress her when a little bit of credit might have done just as well. And this man walked with an almighty confidence through the streets for someone who was unarmed. And those thirty years—so she said very politely:

  “It’s magic!”

  He chuckled and pocketed the cube.

  “You’re a little savage,” he said, “but your examination of it was most logical. I like you. Look! I am an old magician. There is a spirit in that box and there are more spirits under my control than you can possibly imagine. I am like a man living among monkeys. There are things spirits cannot do—or things I choose to do myself, take it any way you will. So I pick one of the monkeys who seems brighter than the rest and train it. I pick you. What do you say?”

  “All right,” said Alyx.

  “Calm enough!” he chuckled. “Calm enough! Good. What’s your motive?”

  “Curiosity,” said Alyx. “It’s a monkeylike trait.” He chuckled again; his flesh choked it and the noise came out in a high, muffled scream.

  “And what if I bite you,” said Alyx, “like a monkey?”

  “No, little one,” he answered gaily, “you won’t. You may be sure of that.” He held out his hand, still shaking with mirth. In the palm lay a kind of blunt knife which he pointed at one of the whitewashed walls that lined the street. The edges of the wall burst into silent smoke, the whole section trembled and slid, and in an instant it had vanished, vanished as completely as if it had never existed, except for a sullen glow at the raw edges of brick and a pervasive smell of burning. Alyx swallowed.

  “It’s quiet, for magic,” she said softly. “Have you ever used it on men?”

  “On armies, little one.”

  So the monkey went to work for him. There seemed as yet to be no harm in it. The little streets admired his generosity and the big ones his good humor; while those too high for money or flattery he won by a catholic ability that was—so the little picklock thought-remarkable in one so stupid. For about his stupidity there could be no doubt. She smelled it. It offended her. It made her twitch in her sleep, like a ferret. There was in this woman—well hidden away —an anomalous streak of quiet humanity that abhorred him, that set her teeth on edge at the thought of him, though she could not have put into words just what was the matter. For stupidity, she thought, is hardly—is not exactly—

  Four months later they broke into the governor’s villa. She thought she might at last find out what this man was after besides pleasure jaunts around the town. Moreover, breaking and entering always gave her the keenest pleasure; and doing so “for nothing” (as he said) tickled her fancy immensely. The power in gold and silver that attracts thieves was banal, in this thief’s opinion, but to stand in the shadows of a sleeping house, absolutely silent, with no object at all in view and with the knowledge that if you are found you will probably have your throat cut—! She began to think better of him. This dilettante passion for the craft, this reckless silliness seemed to her as worthy as the love of a piece of magnetite for the North and South poles—the “faithful stone” they call it in Ourdh.

  “Who’ll come with us?” she asked, wondering for the fiftieth time where the devil he went when he was not with her, whom he knew, where he lived, and what that persistently bland expression on his face could possibly mean.

  “No one,” he said calmly.

  “What are we looking for?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Do you ever do anything for a reason?”

  “Never.” And he chuckled.

  And then, “Why are you so fat?” demanded Alyx, halfway out of her own door, half into the shadows. She had recently settled in a poor quarter of the town, partly out of laziness, partly out of necessity. The shadows playing in the hollows of her face, the expression of her eyes veiled, she said it again, “Why are you so goddamned fat!” He laughed until he wheezed.

  “The barbarian mind!” he cried, lumbering after her in high good humor, “Oh—oh, my dear!—oh, what freshness!” She thought:

  That’s it! and then

  The fool doesn’t even know I hate him.

  But neither had she known, until that very moment.

  They scaled the northeast garden wall of the villa and crept along the top of it without descending, for the governor kept dogs. Alyx, who could walk a taut rope like a circus performer, went quietly. The fat man giggled. She swung herself up to the nearest window and hung there by one arm and a toehold for fifteen mortal minutes while she sawed through the metal hinge of the shutter with a file. Once inside the building (he had to be pulled through the window) she took him by the collar with uncanny accuracy, considering that the inside of the villa was stone dark. “Shut up!” she said, with considerable emphasis.

  “Oh?” he whispered.

  “I’m in charge here,” she said, releasing him with a jerk, and melted into the blackness not two feet away, moving swiftly along the corridor wall. Her fingers brushed lightly alongside her, like a creeping animal: stone, stone, a gap, warm air rising . . . In the dark she felt wolfish, her lips skinned back over her teeth; like another species she made her way with hands and ears. Through them the villa sighed and rustled in its sleep. She put the tips of the fingers of her free hand on the back of the fat man’s neck, guiding him with the faintest of touches through the turns of the corridor. They crossed an empty space where two halls met; they retreated noiselessly into a room where a sleeper lay breathing against a dimly lit window, while someone passed in the corridor outside. When the steps faltered for a moment, the fat man gasped and Alyx wrung his wrist, hard. There was a cough from the corridor, the sleeper in the room stirred and murmured, and the steps passed on. They crept back to the hall. Then he told her where he wanted to go.

  “What!” She had pulled away, astonished, with a reckless hiss of indrawn breath. Methodically he began poking her in the side and giving her little pushes with his other hand—she moving away, outraged—but all in silence. In the distant reaches of the building something fell—or someone spoke—and without thinking, they waited silently until the sounds had faded away. He resumed his continual prodding. Alyx, her teeth on edge, began to creep forward, passing a cat that sat outlined in the vague light from a window, perfectly unconcerned with them and rubbing its paws against its face, past a door whose cracks shone yellow, past ghostly staircases that opened up in vast wells of darkness, breathing a faint, far updraft, their steps rustling and creaking. They were approaching the governor’s nursery. The fat man watched without any visible horror—or any interest, for that matter—while Alyx disarmed the first guard, stalking him as if he were a sparrow, then the one strong pressure on the blood vessel at the back of the neck (all with no noise except the man’s own breathing; she was quiet as a shadow). Now he was trussed up, conscious and glaring, quite unable to move. The second guard was asleep in his chair. The third Alyx decoyed out the anteroom by a thrown pebble (she had picked up several in the street). She was three motionless feet away from him as he stooped to examine it; he never straightened up. The fourth guard (he was in the anteroom, in a feeble glow that stole through the hangings of the nursey beyond) turned to greet his friend—or so thought—and then Alyx judged she could risk a little speech. She said thoughtfully, in a low voice, “That’s dangerous, on the back of the head.”

  “Don’t let it bother you,” said the fat man. Through the parting of the hangings they could see the nurse, asleep on her couch with her arms bare and their golden circlets gleaming in the lamplight, the black slave in a profound huddle of darkness at the farther door, and a shining, tent
ed basket—the royal baby’s royal house. The baby was asleep. Alyx stepped inside—motioning the fat man away from the lamp—and picked the governor’s daughter out of her gilt cradle. She went round the apartment with the baby in one arm, bolting both doors and closing the hangings, draping the fat man in a guard’s cloak and turning down the lamp so that a bare glimmer of light reached the farthest walls.

  “Now you’ve seen it,” she said, “shall we go?”

  He shook his head. He was watching her curiously, his head tilted to one side. He smiled at her. The baby woke up and began to chuckle at finding herself carried about; she grabbed at Alyx’s mouth and jumped up and down, bending in the middle like a sort of pocket-compass or enthusiastic spring. The woman lifted her head to avoid the baby’s fingers and began to soothe her, rocking her in her arms. “Good Lord, she’s cross-eyed,” said Alyx. The nurse and her slave slept on, wrapped in the profoundest unconsciousness. Humming a little, soft tune to the governor’s daughter, Alyx walked her about the room, humming and rocking, rocking and humming, until the baby yawned.

  “Better go,” said Alyx.

  “No,” said the fat man.

  “Better,” said Alyx again. “One cry and the nurse—”

  “Kill the nurse,” said the fat man.

  “The slave—”

  “He’s dead.” Alyx started, rousing the baby. The slave still slept by the door, blacker than the blackness, but under him oozed something darker still in the twilight flame of the lamp. “You did that?” whispered Alyx, hushed. She had not seen him move. He took something dark and hollow, like the shell of a nut, from the palm of his hand and laid it next to the baby’s cradle; with a shiver half of awe and half of distaste Alyx put the richest and most fortunate daughter of Ourdh back into her gilt cradle. Then she said:

  “Now we’ll go.”

  “But I have not what I came for,” said the fat man.

  “And what is that?”

  “The baby.”

  “Do you mean to steal her?” said Alyx curiously.

  “No,” said he, “I mean for you to kill her.”

  The woman stared. In sleep the governor’s daughter’s nurse stirred; then she sat bolt upright, said something incomprehensible in a loud voice, and fell back to her couch, still deep in sleep. So astonished was the picklock that she did not move. She only looked at the fat man. Then she sat by the cradle and rocked it mechanically with one hand while she looked at him.

  “What on earth for?” she said at length. He smiled. He seemed as easy as if he were discussing her wages or the price of pigs; he sat down opposite her and he too rocked the cradle, looking on the burden it contained with a benevolent, amused interest. If the nurse had woken up at that moment, she might have thought she saw the governor and his wife, two loving parents who had come to visit their child by lamplight. The fat man said:

  “Must you know?”

  “I must,” said Alyx.

  “Then I will tell you,” said the fat man, “not because you must, but because I choose. This little six-months morsel is going to grow up.”

  “Most of us do,” said Alyx, still astonished.

  “She will become a queen,” the fat man went on, “and a surprisingly wicked woman for one who now looks so innocent. She will be the death of more than one child and more than one slave. In plain fact, she will be a horror to the world. This I know.”

  “I believe you,” said Alyx, shaken.

  “Then kill her,” said the fat man. But still the picklock did not stir. The baby in her cradle snored, as infants sometimes do, as if to prove the fat man’s opinion of her by showing a surprising precocity; still the picklock did not move, but stared at the man across the cradle as if he were a novel work of nature.

  “I ask you to kill her,” said he again.

  “In twenty years,” said she, “when she has become so very wicked.”

  “Woman, are you deaf? I told you—”

  “In twenty years!” In the feeble light from the lamp she appeared pale, as if with rage or terror. He leaned deliberately across the cradle, closing his hand around the shell or round-shot or unidentifiable object he had dropped there a moment before; he said very deliberately:

  “In twenty years you will be dead.”

  “Then do it yourself,” said Alyx softly, pointing at the object in his hand, “unless you had only one?”

  “I had only one.”

  “Ah, well then,” she said, “here!” and she held out to him across the sleeping baby the handle of her dagger, for she had divined something about this man in the months they had known each other, and when he made no move to take the blade, she nudged his hand with the handle.

  “You don’t like things like this, do you?” she said.

  “Do as I say, woman!” he whispered. She pushed the handle into his palm. She stood up and poked him deliberately with it, watching him tremble and sweat; she had never seen him so much at a loss. She moved round the cradle, smiling and stretching out her arm seductively. “Do as I say!” he cried.

  “Softly, softly.”

  “You’re a sentimental fool!”

  “Am I?” she said. “Whatever I do, I must feel; I can’t just twiddle my fingers like you, can I?”

  “Ape!”

  “You chose me for it.”

  '‘Do as I say!”

  “Sh! You will wake the nurse.” For a moment both stood silent, listening to the baby’s all-but-soundless breathing and the rustling of the nurse’s sheets. Then he said, "Woman, your life is in my hands.”

  “Is it?” said she.

  “I want your obedience!”

  “Oh no,” she said softly, “I know what you want. You want importance because you have none; you want to swallow up another soul. You want to make me fear you and I think you can succeed, but I think also that I can teach you the difference between fear and respect. Shall I?”

  “Take care!” he gasped.

  “Why?” she said. “Lest you kill me?”

  “There are other ways,” he said, and he drew himself up, but here the picklock spat in his face. He let out a strangled wheeze and lurched backwards, stumbling against the curtains. Behind her Alyx heard a faint cry; she whirled about to see the governor’s nurse sitting up in bed, her eyes wide open.

  “Madam, quietly, quietly,” said Alyx, “for God’s sake!”

  The governor’s nurse opened her mouth.

  “I have done no harm,” said Alyx passionately, “I swear it!” But the governor’s nurse took a breath with the clear intention to scream, a hearty, healthy, full-bodied scream like the sort picklocks hear in nightmares. In the second of the governor’s nurse’s shuddering inhalation—in that split second that would mean unmentionably unpleasant things for Alyx, as Ourdh was not a kind city—Alyx considered launching herself at the woman, but the cradle was between. It would be too late. The house would be roused in twenty seconds. She could never make it to a door—or a window—not even to the garden, where the governor’s hounds could drag down a stranger in two steps. All these thoughts flashed through the picklock’s mind as she saw the governor’s nurse inhale with that familiar, hideous violence; her knife was still in her hand; with the smooth simplicity of habit it slid through her fingers and sped across the room to bury itself in the governor’s nurse’s neck, just above the collarbone in that tender hollow Ourdhian poets love to sing. The woman’s open-mouthed expression froze on her face; with an “uh!” of surprise she fell forward, her arms hanging limp over the edge of the couch. A noise came from her throat. The knife had opened a major pulse, and in the blood’s slow, powerful, rhythmic tides across sheet and slippers and floor Alyx could discern a horrid similarity to the posture and appearance of the black slave. One was hers, one was the fat man’s. She turned and hurried through the curtains into the anteroom, only noting that the soldier blindfolded and bound in the corner had managed patiently to work loose the thongs around two of his fingers with his teeth. He must have been at it all
this time. Outside in the hall the darkness of the house was as undisturbed as if the nursery were that very Well of Peace whence the gods first drew (as the saying is) the dawn and the color—but nothing else—for the eyes of women. On the wall someone had written in faintly shining stuff, like snail-slime, the single word Fever.

  But the fat man was gone.

  Her man was raving and laughing on the floor when she got home. She could not control him—she could only sit with her hands over her face and shudder—so at length she locked him in and gave the key to the old woman who owned the house, saying, “My husband drinks too much. He was perfectly sober when I left earlier this evening and now look at him. Don’t let him out.”

  Then she stood stock-still for a moment, trembling and thinking: of the fat man’s distaste for walking, of his wheezing, his breathlessness, of his vanity that surely would have led him to show her any magic vehicle he had that took him to whatever he called home. He must have walked. She had seen him go out the north gate a hundred times.

  She began to run.

  To the south Ourdh is built above marshes that will engulf anyone or anything unwary enough to try to cross them, but to the north the city peters out into sand dunes fringing the seacoast and a fine monotony of rocky hills that rise to a countryside of sandy scrub, stunted trees and what must surely be the poorest farms in the world. Ourdh believes that these farmers dream incessantly of robbing travelers, so nobody goes there, all the fashionable world frequenting the great north road that loops a good fifty miles to avoid this region. Even without its stories the world would have no reason to go here; there is nothing to see but dunes and weeds and now and then a shack (or more properly speaking, a hut) resting on an outcropping of rock or nesting right on the sand like a toy boat in a basin. There is only one landmark in the whole place—an old tower hardly even fit for a wizard—and that was abandoned nobody knows how long ago, though it is only twenty minutes’ walk from the city gates. Thus it was natural that Alyx (as she ran, her heart pounding in her side) did not notice the stars, or the warm night-wind that stirred the leaves of the trees, or indeed the very path under her feet; though she knew all the paths for twenty-five miles around. Her whole mind was on that tower. She felt its stones stick in her throat. On her right and left the country flew by, but she seemed not to move; at last, panting and trembling, she crept through a nest of tree-trunks no thicker than her wrist (they were very old and very tough) and sure enough, there it was. There was a light shining halfway between bottom and top. Then someone looked out, like a cautious householder out of an attic, and the light went out.