Avram Davidson
Sleep Well of Nights
An inexplicably underrated writer, Avram Davidson is one of the most eloquent and individual voices in modern SF and fantasy. During his thirty-year career, he has produced a long sequence of erudite and entertaining novels—including Masters of the Maze, Rogue Dragon, Peregrine: Primus, Rork!, The Enemy of My Enemy, Clash of Star Kings, and the justly renowned The Phoenix and the Mirror—and also firmly established himself as one of the finest short-story writers of our times. Davidson's stylish, witty, and elegant stories have been collected in The Best of Avram Davidson, Or All the Seas with Oysters, Strange Seas and Shores, The Redward Edward Papers, and the World Fantasy Award-winning The Enquiries of Doctor Esterhazy. Davidson had also won a Hugo and an Edgar Award. His most recent books are Collected Fantasies, a collection, and, as editor, the anthology Magic For Sale . Upcoming is a sequel to The Phoenix and the Mirror, entitled Vergil in Avemo.
In recent years, Davidson had been producing some of his best work ever in a series of stories (as yet uncollected, alas) detailing the strange adventures of Jack Limekiller. The Limekiller stories are set against the lushly evocative background of "British Hidalgo," Davidson's vividly realized, richly imagined version of one of those tiny, eccentric Central American nations that exist in near-total isolation on the edge of the busy twentieth-century world . . . a place somehow at once flamboyant and languorous, where strange things can—and do—happen, and magic is never very far away.
In "Sleep Well of Nights," probably the best of the Limekiller stories, he shows us that death need not necessarily deter the strong of will, and that even something as simple as a good night's sleep must somehow be earned. . . .
"Are those lahvly young ladies with you, then?" the Red Cross teacher asked.
Limekiller evaded the question by asking another, a technique at least as old as the Book of Genesis. "Which way did they go?" he asked.
But it did not work this time. "Bless me if I saw them gow anywhere! They were both just standing on the corner as I went by."
Limekiller gave up not so easily. "Ah, but which corner?"
A blank look. "Why . . . this corner."
This corner was the corner of Grand Arawack and Queen Alexandra Streets in the Town of St. Michael of the Mountains, capital of Mountains District in the Colony of British Hidalgo. Fretwork galleries dripping with potted plants and water provided shade as well as free shower baths. These were the first and second streets laid out and had originally been deer trails; Government desiring District Commissioner Bartholomew "Bajan" Bainbridge to supply the lanes with names, he had, with that fund of imagination which helped build the Empire, called them First and Second Streets: it was rather a while before anyone in Government next looked at a map and then decided that numbered streets should run parallel to each other and not, as in this instance, across each other. And as the Grand Arawack Hotel was by that time built and as Alexandra (long-suffering consort of Fat Edward) was by that time Queen, thus they were renamed and thus had remained.
"St. Michael's" or "Mountains" Town, one might take one's pick, had once been a caravan city in miniature. The average person does not think of caravan cities being located in the Americas, and, for that matter, neither does anyone else. Nevertheless, trains of a hundred and fifty mules laden with flour and rum and textiles and tinned foods coming in, and with chicle and chicle and chicle going out, had been common enough to keep anyone from bothering to count them each time the caravans went by. The labor of a thousand men and a thousand mules had been year by year spat out of the mouths of millions of North Americans in the form of chewing gum.
So far as Limekiller knew, Kipling had never been in either Hidalgo, but he might have thought to have been if one ignored biographical fact and judged only by his lines.
Across from the hotel stood the abattoir and the market building. The very early morning noises were a series of bellows, bleats, squeals, and screams which drowned out cockcrow and were succeeded by the rattle and clatter of vulture claws on the red-painted corrugated iron roofs. Then the high voices of women cheapening meat. But all of these had now died away. Beef and pork and mutton (sheep or goat) could be smelled stewing and roasting now and then as the mild currents of the air alternated the odors of food with those of woodsmoke. He even thought he detected incense; there was the church spire nearby.
But there were certainly no young ladies around, lovely or otherwise.
There had been no very lengthy mule trains for a very long time.
There had been no flotillas of tunnel boats at the Town Wharf for a long time, either, their inboard motors drawn as high-up in "tunnels" within the vessels as possible to avoid the sand and gravel and boulders which made river navigation so difficult on the upper reaches of the Ningoon. No mule trains, no tunnel boats, no very great quantities of chicle, and everything which proceeded to and from the colonial capital of King Town and St. Michael's going now by truck along the rutted and eroded Frontier Road. No Bay boat could ever, in any event, have gotten higher up the river than the narrows called Bomwell's Boom; and the Sacarissa (Jno. Limekiller, owner and Master and, usually—save for Skippy the Cat—sole crew) was at the moment Hired Out.
She had been chartered to a pair of twosomes from a Lake Winnipeg boat club, down to enjoy the long hours of sunshine. Jack had been glad enough of the money but the charter had left him at somewhat of a loss: leisure to him had for so long meant to haul his boat up and clean and caulk and paint her: all things in which boatmen delight. Leisure without the boat was something new. Something else.
To pay his currently few debts had not taken long. He had considered getting Porter Portugal to sew a new suit of sails, but old P.P. was not a slot machine; you could not put the price into P.P.'s gifted hands and expect, after a reasonable (or even an unreasonable) period of time, for the sails to pop out. If Port-Port were stone sober he would not work and if dead drunk he could not work. The matter of keeping him supplied with just the right flow of old Hidalgo dark rum to, so to speak, oil the mechanism, was a nice task indeed: many boat owners, National, North American, or otherwise, had started the process with intentions wise and good: but Old Port was a crazy-foxy old Port and all too often had drunk them under the table, downed palm and needle, and vanished with the advance-to-buy-supplies into any one of the several stews which flourished on his trade.("A debt of honor, me b'y," he would murmur, red-eyed sober, long days later. "Doesn't you gots to worry. I just hahs a touch ahv de ague, but soon as I bettah. . . .")
So that was one reason why John L. Limekiller had eventually decided to forget the new suit of sails for the time being.
Filial piety had prompted him to send a nice long letter home, but a tendency towards muscle spasms caused by holding a pen had prompted him to reduce the n.l.l. to a picture post card. He saw the women at the post office, one long and one short.