S. P. Somtow - The Fallen Country.pdf - S. P. Somtow - widez2

Scanned by gojukai

From Tales of Fantasy, Elsewhere Vol. II

Edited by Terri Windling &

Mark Alan Arnold

v1.1: 2005-05-10 by reb – removed hard returns, corrected all obvious errors; unclear passages marked by [sp?]; not checked

against hard copy

The Fallen Country

Somtow Sucharitkul

He had blank, sky-blue eyes and confused blond hair. He had a wry, dry voice with just a lemon

twist of longing in it. He was small for his age, almost as though he had willed himself not to grow.

As I closed the door behind us, my hand brushed against his and he flinched away violently in the

split second before willing himself to smile; from this I pegged him as a victim of child abuse.

"Hi," I said, answering him. "My name is Dora Marx." I eased him into the brown, wombish chair

that faced my desk. "You may call me—" I sat down myself, with the stuck-record-in-a-groove

smoothness that comes from seeing a thousand children a year for twenty years, "—either Dora, or

Mrs. Marx. Whichever makes you feel more comfortable."

"I think I’d prefer Mrs. Marx," he said. "But," he added, "you can call me Billy." Touche.

He didn't look at me. I went to the window to slam out the eleven o'clock yelling from the

schoolyard. God damn it, they should never make you work under these conditions ...

I said, "You're the one who—"

"They found at five in the morning, dinging to the steeple of Santa Maria's. You read the papers?"

"Sometimes," I said, flicking the dipping out of his file.

BILLY BINDER. AGE 12—

"Where'd you get that scar?" — like an albino earth-worm, wriggling into the sleeve of his teeshirt.

"Fell off my bike." Sure.

—FOUND HALF-DEAD ON THE LEDGE, HIS ARMS AROUND THE STEEPLE ON THE

SIDE OVERLOOKING ANGEL PLAZA. FATHER EPSTEIN, SUMMERTIME PASTOR

STANDING IN FOR FATHER SANTINI, WHILE TRYING TO RING THE BELL—

"It says here," I said, "that you were suffering from severe frostbite."

"Yes. From the snow."

"It doesn't snow in Florida in the middle of August—" No point trying to argue with him yet. My

job was to listen, only to listen. I wasn't trained to root out traumas. It wasn't up to me to

pronounce the kid an attempted suicide either, or to solve the mystery of how he got to the topmost

turret of a locked historical monument, or to elucidate the medical wonder of frostbite in a

hundred-degree heatwave - I was only a counsellor in a parochial school too poor and stupid to

afford an expert.

I wouldn't get anywhere by questioning his story. Perhaps I should start with something else. "How

often do they beat you up?" I said.

"What?" Terror flecked his eyes for a second. Then they went dead. He said, "Almost every day." It

was in the same tone of voice.

"Who?"

"Pete, my Mom's boyfriend."

"What?"

He told me about it, never raising his voice. I had been doing this for twenty years. After a while

you grow iron railings round your brains. Nothing hurts anymore. I listened, staring at my hands and

wishing a ton of Porcelana on them. I knew I would sit there and endure until the catalogue of

beltings and poundings had dissolved into incoherence, into tears, into hysteria, and then I would

flow into the cracks in the kid's soul like epoxy glue and make him seem whole for a while ... but he

didn't give me a chance. He went on in that same monotone, detail after detail, until it was I who

was ready to crack. I held up

my hand. He stopped.

"Don't you ever cry?" I said.

"Not any more," he said. "I’ve promised."

"What do you mean, you promised?"

"The Snow Dragon."

"Tell me about him."

"I knew it!" he cried. Now he was exultant, taunting. I wasn't prepared for the change in mood; I

started most unprofessionally. "You're supposed to be trying to help me or something, but all you

want to do is listen to me lie!"

Shifting gears to accommodate his outburst, "Is that why he hits you?"

"Yes! Yes! But I won't stop!"

"It's all right," I said. "You can lie if you want. You can tell all the lies you want in this room.

Nothing will ever escape from here ..."

"Like a confessional? Like a black hole?"

"Yes." Imaginative imagery, at least. This kid was no dummy. "Like a black hole." He looked me in

the eye for the first time. His eyes were clear as glass; I could read no deceit in them.

"Good," he said firmly. I waited. I think he had begun to trust me.

"So what were you really doing, then, up there. Straddling the steeple, I mean."

"Rescuing a princess."

That's how he started telling me the stories. The stories! They would have been the envy of any

clinical psychiatrist with a pet theory and a deadline and a paper to be churned out in a fury. To me

they were only stories. Of course I did

not believe them; but my job was to listen, not to judge.

Billy had been adopted by one set of parents after another. He couldn't remember the first few.

After the divorcees had played musical chairs for a while he had settled with the third or fourth

mother, Joan, and they'd moved to our town, a spiderweb of brash fast food places that circled the

Eighteenth Century Spanish church that was the town's one attraction. Billy shed pasts like a snake

sloughing its skin or a duck shaking off canal water. The only thing he kept was the name, Billy

Binder. He'd always been adamant about his name. He'd always gotten his way about it somehow:

throwing tantrums, whining, running away. It was the only part of him he'd ever kept successfully.

Days his mother typed accounts in a doctor's office; nights she went to school, dreaming vaguely of

a softer future. As I grew to know Billy I would go over and meet her sometimes at the doctor's. She

was a dark-haired, tired, cowering, rake-thin woman; I never got much of a feel for her. And

somehow I never met Pete. I never went to their house, except once, at the end of my association

with Billy; and I shall never return there.

Pete came on a motorcycle and took over their lives. He and Billy exchanged a single glance and

understood each other to the core: enemy. But Pete was the stronger, physically anyway. He

wielded his leather belt like a lion tamer in a circus. Nights, after it was over — and it almost

always happened, every night — Billy went to his closet of a room and lay down choked with anger.

He never tried to disguise his weals. He flaunted them in school, never offering any explanation for

them. And no one dared ask him for one. They saw him shrouded in anger as in a burning

forceshield, and they were afraid to touch his loneliness.

A night came when the anger burst at last. It was long past midnight and the pain had died down a

little. Billy got out of bed, wriggled into some old cutoffs, pulled on a teeshirt, wincing as it raked

against new welts. He tiptoed out of the house. He found his old bike leaning against the front

door, and then he hiked like a maniac into the burning night. He did not know what drove him. A

quick twisty path rounded some shadowy palms and crossed an empty highway and skirted the

beach for some miles. It was a night without stars, the heat wringing moisture from the blackness.

At first he heard the sea, but the surf-shatter faded quickly. In the distance rose a wall of luxury

hotels, distant giants tombstones. In a while he made a left turn into the town. He was not hiking

with any particular purpose. It began to snow.

He didn't take it in at first. His anger was everything. But it didn't stop. Fragments of cold were

pelting his face, and then great sheets of white, but Billy had never seen snow before, and he was

too busy being angry to realize that this was a blizzard....

( I’ll kill him ! he was thinking, forcing the pedals against the ever-piling snow ...)

And then it thinned. He came to a stop, stuck against a rock or a drift. A dead, sourceless light

played over vistas of whiteness. It didn't feel like the world at all. The snow didn't stop. Sometimes

it tickled his face. Sometimes it swirled in the sky, its flakes like stars in a nebula. There was no sun

or moon. Misty in the horizon, an impossibly far horizon, Billy saw white crenellated castle walls

that ran behind a white hill and emerged from the other side of it; they went on as far as he could

see, twisting like marble serpents. Billy began walking towards the hill. He did not wonder at where

he was. The cold didn't touch him, not like sticking your hand in the freezer. He walked. By a

strange foreshortening or trick of perspective he found himself facing the hill—

The hill's wings flapped, eyes flared briefly, fire-brilliant blue. It was a dragon. Again the eyes flared,

dulled, flared, dulled ... Billy gazed at the dragon for a long time. In a rush that sent the wind

sighing, the dragon spread its wings, sweeping the snow into fierce sudden flurries. Billy saw that

the dragon had no scales but little mozaic-things of interlocking snowflakes; when the dragon's eyes

flashed, the flakes caught rainbow fire and sparkled for a few seconds.

The dragon said, "Billy Binder, welcome to the fallen country."

Billy was afraid at last. "Send me home!" he cried. And then he remembered Pete and said nothing.

When the dragon spoke, its voice was piping clear, emotionless, like the voice of a child's ghost. It

wasn’t a booming, threatening voice at all.

"What are you thinking?" he said. "That I don't sound fierce and threatening the way a dragon

should? That I don't roar?" He did roar then, a tinny, buzzing roar like an electric alarm clock.

Billy said, "Who has stolen your roar?" He felt a twinge of pity for the dragon; but then his anger

slapped it down.

"This is the fallen country. Billy. Here there is no emotion at all. We cannot love or hate. We

cannot utter great thunderous cries of joy or terror...the world is muted by perpetual snow. That is

why you are here."

"What do you mean?" Billy was scared and wanted to go back to his bike. He looked behind him

and saw it, impossibly far away; it seemed strange that he could have walked this far, through the

trudge-thick snowdrifts, in only a few minutes. Perhaps time was different here. He knew that time

was different in different countries.

The dragon said, "You are here because you are full of anger, Billy Binder. In the fallen country we

need such anger as yours. Anger is strength here ... if I could feel such anger, such love, such hatred

as you can feel, I would die. Billy...."

Wrenching his feet out of the knee-deep coldless snow, Billy forced himself to walk toward the

dragon. Even the dread he had been feeling had passed away now. "But who has done this to you?

Who has stolen your feelings?"

"You know. You have touched his shadow. His shadow has come pursuing you. The Ringmaster.

With his whip of burning cold."

Pete! "You should kill him!" Whiteness burned all around him, making the tears run.

"He cannot be killed. He slips from world to world as easily as you have done." Again the pitiful

whinebuzz that passed for a roar. "But we can work against him. Slowly, slowly we can sap him of

his strength. Your anger is powerful here. Your anger can build bridges, can burn pathways through

the snow. Try it, Billy."

Billy clenched himself, feeling the rage course through him, and when he opened his eyes he saw

greenery poking through the snow for a few seconds, but then it was misted over by white again.

"Do you see?" the dragon said. "You are Binder."

"That's my name," said Billy, "but—"

"Your roots are in the fallen country. That is why you have never felt truly at home in your world,

why you have been tossed from household to household, taking only the name Binder with you."

Thunder shuddered through the cloud-haze. For a moment the sky parted. A whip cracking, halving

the sky, retracting into the greyness, a burst of sound that could have been applause or a circus

band starting up or a crowd deriding a fallen clown—

"Pete!" he blurted out.

"No," said the dragon, "only the shadow; the Ringmaster has a thousand shadows, and it is only a

shadow of his shadow that has followed you all the way to your distant world."

Billy nodded, understanding suddenly.

Then he saw a red weal open on the dragon's neck, blood trickling in slow motion onto the snow,

blood that stained the whiteness like a poppy-duster — "He's hurt you!" he said. They were akin

then, he and this alien creature. Both were at the mercy of — "Can't you cry out?" he cried into the

howling wind, "Can't you feel anything?"

"No." The dragon's voice did not change. "Here one need feel no pain at all. It's better to feel

nothing; isn't it? Come now. Ride me."

He extended a wing; it fanned out into a diamond-speckled staircase. When Billy stepped onto it he

realized that he felt no cold at all. He should be freezing to death through his worn sneakers, but he

felt only numbness. It was less real than a dream.

"Let’s go now. We'll have adventures, rescuing princesses, fighting monsters and such. Isn't that

what every child wants to do? A lot of children find their way into the fallen country. And they find

a use for themselves here ... one day we'll have a whole army of them."

"But I want to find the Ringmaster himself! I don't want him to hurt you and me anymore. I want to

kill him."

The dragon only laughed, a wretched ghost of a laugh. Billy clambered up the wing.

"Every child who comes here dreams of reaching the Ringmaster. Of shaping his anger into a bridge

that will touch the very heart of the Ringmaster and topple the circus where he wields his whip.

They learn better, Billy."

"I want to kill him!"

Again a spectre of a laugh. Billy settled on the dragon's back; it was ridged with soft dunes of snow.

The dragon flapped his wings, not resoundingly, but with a thud like a cellar door slamming shut in

a next-door house.

The dragon said, "You'll never need to cry again, Billy. From now on you will have to save your

grief, your anger, save it for here where it will be of some use. Listen! I am the Snow Dragon, the

last surviving dragon of the fallen country. I survived by purging myself of all that made me dragon:

S. P. Somtow - The Fallen Country.pdf

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: