Things Will Never Be the Same Page 21

  “Look, mater,” said the girl, “that man in the middle is half-horsey!”

  The woman picked the child up by the hair and shook her.

  “Learn not to lie, Portia,” said her mother, never taking her eyes off the elephant.

  “I can’t believe it,” said Vegetius. “Two and a half months gone by, halfway to the Pillars, and no troubles!”

  “These is strange times,” said Prorsus, putting more wood on the fire. “Nobody knows what to expect with a new emperor sittin’ on the throne like it was a pot. They don’t know which way to jump. They’re all just waiting for the other caliga to drop.” They were camped off the road near Aquilia in Noricum. The old men were already drunk or asleep. Chiron lay nearby, his human part asleep over a flat rock, his equine body folded under him. Now and then a long low sound came from his chest.

  “This trip’s been pretty easy. Company’s better, anyway,” said Prorsus. “I’ve had some tough jobs, with real scuzzes to work with. I once stole a quinquireme from Ephesus and sold it a week later in Sardis, and nobody ever saw it.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Decius. “Sardis is overland from Ephesus. There aren’t any rivers or canals connecting them!”

  “It was for a bet,” said Prorsus. “Some jobs is just easier than others, I guess.”

  So it went though Mutina and Trebia in Gallo Cisalpina, Dertona in Liguria, where the roads often became crowded, and missing entirely the dead backwater of Italia itself, through Augusta Taurinorem, Massilia and Narbo Martius in Narbonensis, down the long chest of Tarraconensis, past Novo Carthago on the shore of the Mare Internum, and along the coast roads, passing south of Hispalia in Bætica to the Gates of Hercules.

  They were on a hill overlooking a small seaport. Across to the southwest was Mauretania, emblazoned with the sunset.

  “We’re here,” said Vegetius to Chiron. “Now let’s get you home.”

  “We’ll have to hire a ship.”

  “So it is Africa we go to!” said Decius Muccinus.

  “Not really,” said Chiron.

  “Then for the gods’ sakes, where?” asked Vegetius.

  “Out there,” said Chiron, pointing to the sunset.

  “What! There’s nothing out there!”

  “There’s another land. The land centaurs come from. And horses.”

  “How the Dis did you get here?! You didn’t have ships?!”

  “We walked. It was colder then. The ocean was lower then, and more land stuck out. Of course, we came the other way, through Asia. I’m taking you by a short cut.”

  Whistling a tune, Prorsus started down the hill.

  “Where are you going?” asked Vegetius, beside himself.

  “To find passage back for the drunks and to find a boat that’ll get him home,” he said, jerking his thumb toward the centaur.

  “What! What!”

  “He hasn’t lied to you yet, has he?” asked Prorsus, over his shoulder.

  Vegetius ran down to a cork tree and gnawed at the bark, tears streaming down his face. After awhile, he felt better.

  “Sorry,” he said to Chiron. “It’s been such a long trip. I thought it almost over.”

  Chiron put his hands on Vegetius’ shoulders. “Soon,” he said. “Soon, you’ll have the book. Soon, I’ll be home. It had to be this way. If I would have told you in Smyrnea, you would not have come. And you would have remained a bitter old man the rest of your life. And I would die in Thracia, so far from my homeland.”

  “I’m just tired.”

  “I, too,” said Chiron. “More than you know. Let’s make camp. No more masquerades. No more processions. Let the world gape. I’m going home.”

  They boarded a ship next midnight and set sail westward. Prorsus had sold the elephant to a merchantman captain returning to Byzantium in exchange for passage for the old men. They had said their goodbyes the evening before boarding.

  When dawn broke on the ship in the Mare Atlanticum, it became very quiet. The crew saw the centaur and kept its distance.

  “When do we put north or south?” asked the bosun, expecting a turn starboard toward Hibernia, or port to the Wild Dog Islands.

  “We don’t,” said the captain. “The course is west by northwest.”

  “How long?” asked the bosun.

  “As long as it takes,” said the captain. He reached into the poop cabin and pulled out a bag half his size.

  He kicked at it.

  It jangled.

  “Hear that?” asked the captain. “The bag talks!”

  “That it does,” said the bosun.

  “What does it say?”

  “It says west by northwest by the stars, sir!”

  “Just what it said to me.”

  For two weeks the sea had been still and flat as a sheet of lead, without a cloud in the sky.

  The sail was furled. The sailors’ hands were raw with rowing toward the westering sun.

  “It used to be much easier to sail there for a while, or so I’m told,” said Chiron. “There used to be a big island out here in the middle, though they charged an arm and a leg for a port call.”

  During the last week they had lightened the load as much as possible. Now there was nothing left but food, water, the money bags and some extra canvas on board. Still the hours of flat calm dragged by.

  Vegetius, Prorsus and Muccinus took turns at the oars, and Chiron stood helm though there was very little need to steer.

  The sun came up abaft them every morning, and set before them each evening, and it seemed they had moved not at all.

  They awoke to find themselves, the captain and bosun at one end of the vessel and the crew at the other. No one was rowing. The oars were shipped.

  “Well,” said the captain. “What is it?”

  One of the men stepped forward. “We’ve been without wind for seventeen days now. We row all day and night. We get nowhere.”

  “There’s nothing for it but to put our backs in it and hope for wind,” said the captain.

  “We could turn back.” There were grumbles behind him from the others.

  There was a consultation with the passengers. “Out of the question,” said the captain. “We’re more than halfway there.”

  “Says who?” yelled someone.

  “Say I, and I’m the captain.”

  “Well, then,” said the crew’s leader. “We could lighten the load.”

  “What’s that?” asked Prorsus, suddenly taking an interest in the proceedings.

  “You know what I mean, governor,” said the crewman, nodding his head sideways. “Why don’t we put the horsey over the side?”

  “Quite right!” said Prorsus. He grabbed the sailor by crotch and tunic and pitched him over the railing. The man coughed and floundered in the glassy water.

  “Next!” said Prorsus. “I figure three more make up for my friend Chiron here.” He opened his arms in a wrestler’s invitation. “Weight’s weight.”

  No one came forward.

  “Toss him a line,” said Prorsus.

  They pulled the wet and strangling sailor back aboard.

  “Do we understand each other?” Prorsus asked the assembled sailors.

  “Aye, aye!” they said in one voice.

  As if by some propitiatory magic, a dancing line of water moved toward them from the east. It caught up to and passed the ship. The frill of mane on Chiron’s back fluttered and a cool breeze blew into Vegetius’ right ear.

  “Well, hell and damn!” yelled the captain to the crew. “Don’t you know wind when you feel it? Unfurl the fonkin’ sail!”

  The canvas came down and filled, the ship groaned and jerked ahead, bearing them away from the morning sun. The sailors, among them the wet one, joined in
“Old Neptune’s Song.”

  They lowered the gangplank, and Chiron went down into the surf and onto the sandbar in the river estuary.

  The shoreline was broken by trees and clearings. Here and there shaggy humped shapes grazed, some few stopping to watch, then returning to their forage. They looked like wisents only they had smaller horns.

  Chiron turned to the ship.

  “Fishing should be good all up the shore,” he said. “Won’t take long to replenish your stores. Good water, too. Follow the warm water north, then follow east when it turns. You’ll end up in Brittania or Hibernia. You know them, Captain?”

  “I’m half tindigger,” he said. “I paint myself blue once a year when the mood overcomes me.”

  Chiron laughed, then coughed, a hard wracking series of them. He leaned the upper half of his body against a tree, steadying himself with his right hand. Then he straightened and turned to walk away.

  “Goodbye. Goodbye horsey. So long, Mr. Chiron,” they all yelled from the ship.

  “Wait! Wait! The Hippiatrika?!” yelled Vegetius.

  Chiron turned. “In the cave. On the table. The two unopened scroll tubes. Thank you, Renatus Vegetius. I will remember you always.”

  He then turned, lifted his tail, his regrown hair and beard streaming in the wind like a white banner, and broke, for a few paces, into a canter, and disappeared through the nearest stand of trees, heading westward.

  A yell of exultation and homecoming, of surrender and defiance rose up, startling some of the browsing creatures. Then it, too, like the drumming hoofbeats, echoed and died away westward.

  “Back water and up sail, you sea hogs!” hollered the captain.

  In the three years of life remaining to him, P. Renatus Vegetius returned home, retrieved the books in the cave, and incorporated the Hippiatrika into his great work on the diseases of mules, horses and cattle, the Mulomedicina.

  Decius Muccinus, free and married, had twin sons whom they named Aurem and Renatus.

  Nemo Prorsus became the Christian Bishop of Sardis.

  On his deathbed, Renatus Vegetius looked around his room at his sisters and their husbands and children, at his newly-freed slaves, and at what few friends as had not preceded him in death.

  About the only thing he regretted was never getting to hunt lions from a chariot in the wet marshlands of Libya.

  He remembered one sunny day on a far shore half a world away, and the cry of happiness that had drifted back to him out of those woods.

  What was killing a few old lions compared to what he had done?

  He had helped a tired old friend get home.

  Vegetius was still smiling when they put the coins on his eyes.

  AFTERWORD

  I hate hate hate hate hate fantasy as it has become in American publishing.

  Except for my old friend George R.R. Martin and a couple of notable others (like Tad Williams I’m told, since I can’t read most of the stuff anymore)—it’s all 6th hand rewrites of Tolkien, gl orified Dungeons and Dragons scenarios, plot coupons and way twee wee folk stories with the intellectual content of a good fart.

  I mean, if anywhere on the back jacket it says “Lost Heir” or “Dark Kingdom” or “dragon-ravaged lands” or “plucky band of adventurers” you can bet it stays on the Borders or Barnes & Noble rack and is safe from me.

  They’re just not writing Silverlock every time out of the chute, are they?

  You can imagine my horror and intellectual fear when a fantasy story came to me.

  Okay, I said, the only way I’ll write a fantasy story is as if it were happening to truck drivers.

  So I did. You just read the result.

  I went to the Classics Library at the University of Texas (since they’d upped the Courtesy Borrower’s Card from free to $2.00 a year to $15.00 to $25.00 in the last 4 years of course I no longer had one so had to do all my research in the library.) We’re talking the late spring of 1987 here.

  I of course read P. Renatus Vegetius’ Mulomedicina in the original Latin (ahem), that being the translation of the original Greek Hippiatrika, since it had supposedly been handed down from Chiron him(it)self, and made copious notes.

  Anyway, I had my plot and my protag. and the centaur. Then Nemo Prorsus walked in (like Captain Jack Cheese in “Heart of Whitenesse” or the kidnapper in “US”) and the story really took off.

  (And a word about names in the story—except for the real people, they’re mostly from the glossary to Alexander Lenard’s translation of Winnie Ille Pu (1960) a well-thumbed beat-up 3rd printing of which I still have . . .)

  And you need to know that Nemo Prorsus was written to be played by Bob Hoskins (whenever anyone decides to make a movie of the story.)

  Also more truck-driver stuff: they go to America because that’s where horses came from (and left and died out over here and came back with the Spanish.) Once you start mixing the real in with the fantasy, you just can’t stop.

  I wrote this June 11-16, 1987 and sent it off to Ellen Datlow. She called me on July 15 and wanted some rewrite, mostly taking out the six pages at the beginning where I was showing just how weird life in the Eastern Roman Empire was under Julian the Apostate. I took that out for the Omni printing in June 1988, but I’ve put it back in for every subsequent appearance of the story, including this one.

  As Lew Shiner said “Nobody wins an argument with Waldrop, they only frustrate him a little while.”

  I’m still very proud of this one.

  High fantasy: Take this one in the chops.

  FRENCH SCENES

  The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

  But in ourselves . . .

  —Julius Caesar act 1, sc. 2, ln. 1-2

  There was a time, you read, when making movies took so many people. Actors, cameramen, technicians, screenwriters, costumers, editors, producers, and directors. I can believe it.

  That was before computer animation, before the National Likeness Act, before the Noe’s Fludde of Marvels.

  Back in that time they still used laboratories to make prints; sometimes there would be a year between the completion of a film and its release to theaters.

  Back then they used actual pieces of film, with holes down the sides for the projector. I’ve even handled some of it; it is cold, heavy, and shiny.

  Now there’s none of that. No doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs between the idea and substance. There’s only one person (with maybe a couple of hackers for the dogs’ work) who makes movies: the moviemaker.

  There’s only one piece of equipment, the GAX-600.

  There’s one true law: Clean your mainframe and have a full set of specs.

  I have to keep that in mind, all the time.

  Lois was yelling from the next room where she was working on her movie Monster Without a Meaning.

  “We’ve got it!” she said, storming in. “The bottoms of Morris Ankrum’s feet!”

  “Where?”

  “Querytioup,” she said. It was an image-research place across the city run by a seventeen-year-old who must have seen every movie and TV show ever made. “It’s from an unlikely source,” said Lois, reading from the hard copy. “Tennessee Johnson. Ankrum played Jefferson Davis. There’s a scene where he steps on a platform to give a secession speech.

  “Imagine, Morris Ankrum, alive and kicking, 360°, top and bottom. Top was easy—there’s an overhead shot in Invaders from Mars when the guys in the fuzzy suits stick the ruby hatpin-thing in his neck.”

  “Is that your last holdup? I wish this thing were that goddamn easy,” I said.

  “No. Legal,” she said.

  Since the National Fair Likeness Act passed, you had to pay the person (or the estate) of anyone even remotely famous, anyone recognizable from a movie, anywhe
re. (In the early days after passage, some moviemakers tried to get around it by using parts of people. Say you wanted a prissy hotel clerk—you’d use Franklin Pangborn’s hair, Grady Sutton’s chin, Eric Blore’s eyes. Sounded great in theory but what they got looked like a walking police composite sketch; nobody liked them and they scared little kids. You might as well pay and make Rondo Hatton the bellboy.)

  “What’s the problem now?” I asked.

  “Ever tried to find the heirs of Olin Howlin’s estate?” Lois asked.

  What I’m doing is called This Guy Goes to Town . . . It’s a nouvelle vague movie; it stars everybody in France in 1962.

  You remember the French New Wave? A bunch of film critics who wrote for a magazine, Cahiers du Cinema? They burned to make films, lived, slept, ate films in the 1950s. Bad American movies even their directors had forgotten, B Westerns, German silent Expressionistic bores, French cliffhangers from 1916 starring the Kaiser as a gorilla, things like that. Anything they could find to show at midnight when everybody else had gone home, in theaters where one of their cousins worked as an usher.

  Some of them got to make a few shorts in the mid-fifties. Suddenly studios and producers handed them cameras and money. Go out and make movies, they said: Talk is cheap.

  Truffaut. Resnais. Godard. Rivette. Roehmer. Chris Marker. Alain Robbe-Grillet.

  The Four Hundred Blows. Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Breathless. La Jetée. Trans-Europe Express.

  They blew moviemaking wide open.

  And why I love them is that for the first time, underneath the surface of them, even the comedies, was a sense of tragedy; that we were all frail human beings and not celluloid heroes and heroines.