Songs of the Dying Earth

In the days that followed, Saloona attempted to lure it with tidbits she thought might be enticing — spruce planks, knots of hardwood, the rails of a broken chair. The basilisk only stared at her reproachfully from the edge of the trees, and sometimes scorched her spore nets for spite.

I’m surprised it hasn’t starved by now, she thought one chilly afternoon, and began to assemble another desultory meal for herself. Moments later, a commotion rose from the prism ship’s paddock.

“HALLOO! BEWARE! EN GARDE!”

Saloona peered out the window. A tall, black-clad figure strode through the mossy field, the basilisk in its arms.

Saloona met her at the door. “Mother’s sister’s favored child,” she said, and watched in trepidation as Paytim stooped to let the basilisk run free inside the cottage. “Your arrival comes as a surprise.”

Paytim ignored her. She straightened to gaze with disapproval at the usual farrago of unwashed dishes and dried fungus scattered around the kitchen. Her clothing was disheveled, her black robes smirched with ash and rust-colored stains. There were several unhealed scars upon her arms and face. After a moment, she turned to Saloona.

“You have a wholesome look,” she observed coolly. A second, garnet placebit now winked beside the one formed of the lutist’s fingerbone. “Your antidote is indeed more powerful than I imagined.”

Saloona said nothing. The basilisk nosed at a basket of dried tree-ears, sending up a plume of smoke. When Saloona tried to shoo it off, it yawped at her. Yellow flames emerged from its mouth and she quickly retreated.

Paytim shot Saloona an imperious look, then marched across the kitchen to the hearth.

“Well then.” With a flick of her hand the fire witch ignited the cookstove, then grabbed a saucepan. “Who’s ready for lunch?”

Afterword:

When I was fourteen, my family rented a lakefront cottage in Maine. This was 1971, the summer before high school. Most of my days and nights were spent swimming, or playing endless games of Monopoly on screened porches with my younger brothers and sisters and other kids vacationing nearby.

But for years — decades — I was haunted by the memory of a rainy Saturday when I was alone in the house for much of the day. (This in itself was a miracle.) Very early that morning, I’d accompanied my father to the local general store for breakfast provisions, eggs and bacon, a bag of freshly-made doughnuts. The doughnuts were the real thing, molasses-heavy and fried in lard.

Now, alone at the cottage, I was scrounging around for something to read.

Back in Pound Ridge, my mother had bought a carton of books at the library book sale. I’d gone through most of them already, but near the bottom of the box I found a paperback with its cover stripped. I sank into an ancient camp chair by the window, rain beating down outside and the bag of doughnuts in my lap. I opened the book and began to read.

It was the single most intense reading experience of my life. A few years earlier, The Lord of the Rings had captivated me, but that was over weeks. This was more like a drug (not that I knew that yet) — disorienting, enthralling, disturbing, and slightly sickening. The sickening part was enhanced by the doughnuts. I couldn’t stop eating them, any more than I could stop turning pages. For years afterward, I associated the overwhelming, sensual, slightly nauseating sensation of reading that book with the taste of those doughnuts, along with the flickering green reflection of rain on the lake and the sound of wind in the trees. It was my madeleine.

The one thing I couldn’t remember was its title, or author. For years, all I could recall was the taste of that book. I couldn’t even look for it in used bookstores — the cover had been stripped. Still, somewhere along the road to becoming a writer myself, I heard of Jack Vance, and a classic novel he’d written called The Dying Earth. One day — this would have been around 1985—I was in Wayward Books, a used bookstore near where I lived on Capitol Hill. There was a tiny shelf upstairs for science fiction, and as I glanced at the titles, I spied The Dying Earth. I pulled it out, started to read; and tasted molasses and scorched sugar.

It was that book.

I took it home and read it straight through. No doughnuts this time. Until then, I hadn’t realized what a huge impact The Dying Earth had on my own writing, but I do now. My first three novels, bits and pieces of much that came after — none of them would have happened without that book. And I’m writing this now, in a rainswept cottage on a lake in Maine, with The Dying Earth in front of me. So maybe I wouldn’t have happened, either.

— Elizabeth Hand

Byron Tetrick The Collegeum of Mauge

Here a young boy sets out in search of the infamous father he’s never known, and finds a lot more than he bargained for…