Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

The ship was huge. He had not understood before how huge it was. A hand reached down and grasped his arm, pulled him up from the sea onto the deck.

“Bring us back,” said a voice as loud as the crashing of the sea, urgent and fierce. “Bring us back, or let us go.” Only one eye burned in that bearded face.

“I’m not keeping you here.”

They were giants, on that ship, huge men made of shadows and frozen sea-spray, creatures of dream and foam.

One of them, huger than all the rest, red-bearded, stepped forward. “We cannot land,” he boomed. “We cannot leave.”

“Go home,” said Shadow.

“We came with our people to this southern country,” said the one-eyed man. “But they left us. They sought other, tamer gods, and they renounced us in their hearts, and gave us over.”

“Go home,” repeated Shadow.

“Too much time has passed,” said the red-bearded man. By the hammer at his side, Shadow knew him. “Too much blood has been spilled. You are of our blood, Baldur. Set us free.”

And Shadow wanted to say that he was not theirs, was not anybody’s, but the thin blanket had slipped from the bed, and his feet stuck out at the bottom, and thin moonlight filled the attic room.

There was silence, now, in that huge house. Something howled in the hills, and Shadow shivered.

He lay in a bed that was too small for him, and imagined time as something that pooled and puddled, wondered if there were places where time hung heavy, places where it was heaped and held-cities, he thought, must be filled with time: all the places where people congregated, where they came and brought time with them. And if that were true, Shadow mused, then there could be other places, where the people were thin on the ground, and the land waited, bitter and granite, and a thousand years was an eyeblink to the hills-a scudding of clouds, a wavering of rushes and nothing more, in the places where time was as thin on the ground as the people…

“They are going to kill you,” whispered Jennie, the barmaid.

Shadow sat beside her now, on the hill, in the moonlight. “Why would they want to do that?” he asked. “I don’t matter.”

“It’s what they do to monsters,” she said. “It’s what they have to do. It’s what they’ve always done.”

He reached out to touch her, but she turned away from him. From behind, she was empty and hollow. She turned again, so she was facing him. “Come away,” she whispered.

“You can come to me,” he said.

“I can’t,” she said. “There are things in the way. The path there is hard, and it is guarded. But you can call. If you call me, I’ll come.”

Then dawn came, and with it a cloud of midges from the boggy land at the foot of the hill. Jennie flicked at them with her tail, but it was no use; they descended on Shadow like a cloud, until he was breathing midges, his nose and mouth filling with the tiny, crawling stinging things, and he was choking on the darkness…

He wrenched himself back into his bed and his body and his life, into wakefulness, his heart pounding in his chest, gulping for breath.

VII

Breakfast was kippers, grilled tomatoes, scrambled eggs, toast, two stubby, thumblike sausages, and slices of something dark and round and flat that Shadow didn’t recognize.

“What’s this?” asked Shadow.

“Black pudden’,” said the man sitting next to him. He was one of the security guards, and was reading a copy of yesterday’s Sun as he ate. “Blood and herbs. They cook the blood until it congeals into a sort of a dark, herby scab.” He forked some eggs onto his toast, ate it with his fingers. “I don’t know. What is it they say, you should never see anyone making sausages or the law? Something like that.”

Shadow ate the rest of the breakfast, but he left the black pudding alone.

There was a pot of real coffee now, and he drank a mug of it, hot and black, to wake him up and to clear his head.

Smith walked in. “Shadow-man. Can I borrow you for five minutes?”

“You’re paying,” said Shadow. They walked out into the corridor.

“It’s Mr. Alice,” said Smith. “He wants a quick word.” They crossed from the dismal whitewashed servants’ wing into the wood-paneled vastness of the old house. They walked up the huge wooden staircase and into a vast library. No one was there.

“He’ll just be a minute,” said Smith. “I’ll make sure he knows you’re waiting.”

The books in the library were protected from mice and dust and people by locked doors of glass and wire mesh. There was a painting of a stag on the wall, and Shadow walked over to look at it. The stag was haughty and superior: behind it, a valley filled with mist.

“The Monarch of the Glen,” said Mr. Alice, walking in slowly, leaning on his stick. “The most reproduced picture of Victorian times. That’s not the original, but it was done by Landseer in the late 1850s as a copy of his own painting. I love it, although I’m sure I shouldn’t. He did the lions in Trafalgar Square, Landseer. Same bloke.”