Songs of the Dying Earth

Shrue gave one last whispered command to the daihak and then strolled over to where the Myrmazons had finished collapsing their tents and packing them onto the megillas. He squinted at the disagreeable, spitting, venomous, treacherous reptiles and their high, small, infinitely uncomfortable-looking saddles set ahead of the packs and weapons. To Derwe Coreme, who was tightening the last of what looked to be a thousand straps, he said, “You’re really serious about this epic seven-riding-home nonsense.”

She looked at him coldly.

“You do remember,” he said equally as coldly, “those seas and oceans we crossed coming here?”

“Yes,” she said, hitching a final strap so tightly that the huge megilla gasped out its breath in a foul-smelling whoosh. “And perhaps you remember, in all your centuries of bookish studies — or maybe just because you brag about having a cottage there — that there are land bridges around the Greater and Lesser Polar Seas. That’s why they’re called seas, Shrue, instead of oceans.”

“Hmmm,” said Shrue noncommittally, still frowning up at the restless, wriggling, spitting megillas.

Derwe Coreme stood before him. She was wearing her highest riding boots and held a riding shock-crop which she slapped against her calloused palm from time to time. Shrue the diabolist admitted to himself that he found something about that vaguely exciting.

“Make up your mind if you want to come with us,” she said harshly. “We don’t have an extra megilla or extra saddle, but you’re skinny and light enough that you could ride behind me. If you hang on to me tight enough, you won’t fall off too many times.”

“That will be the day,” said Shrue the diabolist.

Derwe Coreme started to say something else, stopped herself, grabbed a loose scale, and swung herself easily up over the packs and scabbarded crossbows and swords to the tiny saddle. She kicked her boots into the stirrups with the absent ease of infinite experience, waved her hand to the Myrmazons, and the seven megillas leapt away toward the west.

Shrue watched them go until they were less than a dust cloud on the furthest ridge to the west. “The chances of any of you surviving this voyage,” he said to the distant dust cloud, “are nil minus one. The Dying Earth simply has too many sharp teeth.”

KirdriK came out of the Library carrying the things Shrue had requested. He laid the carpet out on the pine needles first — a good size, Shrue thought as he sat crosslegged in its center, five feet wide by nine feet long. Enough room to stretch out and take a nap on. Or to do other things on.

Then KirdriK set out the wicker hamper with Shrue’s warm lunch, a bucket holding three bottles of good wine set to chill, a sweater-cape should the day turn chilly, a book, and a larger chest. “It would have been a mixed metaphor of the worst sort,” said Shrue to no one in particular.

“Yes, Master Magus,” said KirdriK.

Shrue shook his head ruefully. “KirdriK,” he said softly. “I am a fool’s fool.”

“Yes, Master Magus,” said the daihak.

Without another word, Shrue extended his fingers, jinkered the old carpet’s flight threads into life, lifted it eight feet off the ground in a hover, turned to look sideways directly into the daihak’s disinterested — or at least noncommittal — yellow eyes, shook his head a final time, and commanded the carpet west, rising quickly over the trees, pursuing the disappearing dust cloud.

KirdriK watched the speck dwindle for a moment and then shambled bowleggedly into the Library to find something to do — or at least something interesting to read — until his new Master, Ulfänt Banderz, returned, either alone or with his other self.

Afterword:

The summer of 1960—I was 12 years old and visiting my much-older brother Ted and my Uncle Wally in Wally’s third-floor apartment on North Kildare Avenue just off Madison Street in Chicago. Most of the daylight was spent taking the El to museums or the Loop or North Avenue beach or to the beach near the planetarium or to movies, but some days — and many of the evenings — were spent with me sprawled on the daybed in Wally’s little dining room, under the open windows with the heat and street noises of Chicago coming in, reading Jack Vance.

Actually, I was reading a tall stack of my brother’s Ace Double Novels, old issues of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and other paperbacks, but it was the Jack Vance that I remember most vividly. I remember the expansive, odyssiad power of Big Planet and the the narrative energy of The Rapparee (later known as Five Gold Bands) and my introduction to semantics through The Languages of Pao and the brooding fantasy brilliance of Marizian the Magician (later to be The Dying Earth) and the literary style that saturated To Live Forever.