He did not know that it was mortal. He knew only that night was falling, and that there were yet men standing between him and the golden tower, men who had screamed all afternoon that they would kill him first and then his leopard-woman, his serpent-woman, the monster who had for so long rotted the fiber of the realm. So he struck them down with all his remaining strength, and then he turned, half-naked, covered with blood, and limped away from battle toward the tower. If men barred his way, he killed them; but he fell often, and each time he was slower to rise, which made him angry. The tower seemed to grow no closer, and he knew that he should be with his nagini by now.
He would never have reached the tower, but for the valor of a very young officer, far younger than boys in Rome have ever been permitted to enter the Emperor’s service. This boy’s commander, whose personal charge was the safety of the king, had been slain early in the rebellion, and the boy had appointed himself the king’s shield in his stead, following the king through all the dusty turmoil of battle and ever fighting at his side or his back. Now he ran forward to raise the king and support him, all but carrying him toward that distant door through which he had jestingly led a beggar-woman so long ago. None of either side came near them as they struggled through the twilight; none dared.
By the time they at last attained the tower door, the boy knew that the king was dying. He had no strength to turn the key in the lock, nor could he even speak, save with his eyes, to order the boy to do it; yet once they were within, he pulled himself to his feet and climbed the stairs like any eager young man hastening to his beloved. The boy trailed behind, frightened of this place of his parents’ nursery stories, this high darkness rustling with demon queens. Yet care for his king overcame all such terrors, and he was once again at the old man’s side when they stood on the bedchamber threshold with the door swinging open before them.
The nagini was not there. The boy hurried to light the torches on the walls, and saw that the chamber was barren of everything but shadows; shadows and the least, least smell of jasmine and sandalwood. Behind him, the king said clearly, “She has not come.” The boy was not quick enough to catch him when he fell. His eyes were open when the boy lifted him in his arms, and he pointed toward the bed without speaking. When the boy had set him there, and bound his many wounds as best he could, the king beckoned him close and whispered, “Watch the night. Watch with me.” It was no plea, but a command.
So the boy sat all through the night on the great bed where the king and queen of Kambuja had slept in happiness for so long, and he never knew when the king died. He fought to stay awake as hard as he had fought the king’s enemies that day, but he was weary and wounded himself, and he dozed and woke and dozed again. The last time he roused, it was because all the torches had gone out at once, with a sound like a ship’s sails cracking in the breeze, and because he heard another sound, heavy and slow, some cold, rough burden being dragged over cold stone. In the last moonlight he saw her: the immense body filling the room like greenish-black smoke, the seven cobra heads swaying as one, and a flickering about her, as though she were shimmering between two worlds at a speed his eyes could not understand. She was close enough to the bed for him to see that she too bore fresh, bleeding wounds (he said later that her blood was as bright as the sun, and hurt his eyes). When he hurled himself away, rolling and scrambling into a corner, the nagini never looked at him. She bowed her seven heads over the king as he lay, and her burning blood fell and mingled with his blood.
“My people tried to keep me from you,” she said. The boy could not tell whether all the heads spoke, or only one; he said that her voice was full of other voices, like a chord of music. The nagini said, “They told me that today was the day appointed for your death, fixed in the atoms of the universe since the beginning of time, and so it was, and I have always known this, as you knew. But I could not turn away and let it be so, fated or not, and I fought them and came here. He who hides in the shadows will sing that you and I never once failed each other, neither in life nor in death.”
Then she called the king by a name that the boy did not recognize, and she took him up onto the coils of her body, as the folk of these parts believe that a naga named Muchalinda supports this world and those to come. Nor did she leave the bedchamber by the door, but passed slowly into darkness, vanishing with no more trace than the scent of jasmine and sandalwood, and the fading music of all her voices. And what became of her, and of the remains of the king of Kambuja, is not known.
Now I find this story open to some question—there is more evidence to be offered for the existence of nagas than proof positive that they do not exist; but of their commerce with men, much may safely be doubted. But I set it down even so, in honor of that boy who waited until sunrise in that silent golden tower before he dared walk out among the clamor of kites and the moans of the grieving to tell the people of Kambuja that their king was dead and gone. One of his descendants it was—or so he swore—who told me the tale.
And if there is any sort of message or metaphor in it, perhaps it is that sorrow and hunger, pity and love, run far deeper in the world than we imagine. They are the underground rivers that the nagas forever traverse; they are the rain that renews us when the right respect has been paid, whether to the nagas or to one another. And if there are no gods, nor any other worlds than this, if there is no such thing as enlightenment or a soul, still there remain those four rivers—sorrow and hunger, pity and love. We humans can survive for terribly long and long without food, without shelter or clothing or medicine, but it is a fact that we will die very soon if the rain does not come.
Revolt of the Sugar Plum Fairies
Mike Resnick
Arthur Crumm didn’t believe in leprechauns.
He didn’t believe in centaurs, either.
He also didn’t believe in ghosts or goblins or gorgons or anything else beginning with a G. Oh, and you can add H to the list; he didn’t believe in harpies or hobbits, either.
In fact, you could write an awfully thick book about the things he didn’t believe in. You’d have to leave out only one item: the one about the Sugar ,Plum Fairies.
Them, he believed in.
Of course, he had no choice. He had a basement full of them. They were various shades of blue, none of them more than eighteen inches tall, and possessed of high, squeaky voices that would have driven his cats berserk if he had owned any cats. Their eyes were large and round, rather as if they had been drawn by someone who specialized in painting children on black velvet, and their noses were small and pug, and each of them had a little potbelly, and they were dressed as if they were about to be presented to Queen Elizabeth. They looked cloyingly cute, and they made Mickey Mouse sound like a baritone—but they had murder on their minds.
They had been in Arthur’s basement for less than an hour, but already he had managed to differentiate them, which was harder than you might think with a bunch of tiny blue fairies. There was Bluebell, who struck Arthur as the campus radical of the bunch. There was Indigo, with his Spanish accent, and old Silverthorne, the arch-conservative, and Purpletone, the politician, and Inkspot, who spoke jive like he had been born to it. Royal Blue seemed to be their leader, and there was also St. Looie Blues, standing off by himself playing a mournful if tiny saxophone.