The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection
- Автор: Датлоу Эллен, Виндлинг Терри
- Год: 1992
- Язык: английский
- Год: St.Martin’s Press
- Жанр: Ужасы
Электронная книга - «The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection». Краткое содержание книги:
Before the sun rose next morning Poseidon’s daughter was arrowing towards the high cliff of Kastro, where her uncle Zeus received minor deities and petitioning mortals in the first light of dawn. But as the sun rose red over the eastern seas she scanned the high rock and the lemon groves and saw only the silent cocoons of several sleeping-bags, and a stray goat rooting hopefully among the scattered rucksacks.
Back at Plati Yialos, the sand was brazen yellow and the first tourists were stumbling on to the terrace of the taverna, calling for foreign breakfasts. A small snort from the mouth of the bay signalled the arrival of the first boat-load of day-trippers, who presently clambered out on to the jetty by the church and marched in a straggling crocodile along the curving sands, past the few Greeks at their fishing nets, towards the small blue tent where Hanni, patient and cross-legged, awaited prospective pupils. ’
‘Kalamares!’ cried the English, conscious of the need for politeness in foreign lands, and if the Greeks were surprised to be thus greeted with the word for octopus, with the great tact of their nation they gave no sign of it. ‘Guten Morgen!’ cried the Germans with Goethe in their knapsacks. ‘Ciao!’ bubbled the Italians in their slight and slippery swimsuits.
At last, scanning the throng, Poseidon's daughter caught sight of her uncle exercising on a stone jetty at the far end of the beach, where the Germans congregated. His biceps glistened with oil, his stomach was pulled in tautly, and his grey-black hair was gelled straight back from his noble forehead. All around him the Germans threw down their rucksacks, cast off their clothes and thundered mother-naked into the surf.
‘Uncle Zeus,’ cried Poseidon’s daughter from the waves. ‘Who is the most perfect woman in the world?’
‘Don’t “Uncle” me,’ hissed Zeus, swivelling his pectorals towards a naked Nordic girl who stood knee-deep in the surf with her face turned up to the sun. ‘The name’s Stavros.’
Poseidon’s daughter was undaunted, however, and, tugging at his ankle, repeated her question.
‘Well, Greta Garbo, of course,’ said Zeus, with a jealous glance at Hanni’s tent, which was by now quite surrounded by Euro-beauties, so that nothing could be glimpsed of Hanni but the topmost tuft of his blond hair and a faint blue curl of cigarette smoke. He had been lobbied, recently, to make Garbo an immortal, although just at that moment he could see little advantage in immortality and indeed would gladly have exchanged the entire inheritance of Kronos and Ouranos for one sole afternoon inside the sleek hide of that taciturn youth.
Disconsolate, Poseidon’s daughter swam ever-widening circles in the broad bay. Under the surface ripples of light wavered over the rocks, and the anemones opened sleepy brilliant eyes to watch her pass. By now it was almost lunchtime; the caiques with their ballast of water-melons rode at anchor by the quay, and charcoal flared under the griddle on the taverna terrace.
On a promontory near the entrance to the bay she spied her aunt, Athena the owl-eyed, battering squid against a rock to tenderize it. Filled with that urge to confess which love inspires in us, and eager to indulge in the compensatory thrills of chatter, Poseidon’s daughter swam up strongly and surfaced in the hot noon air. Besides—although she herself had no spinsterly aspirations—she genuinely did admire her aunt, who, unlike her mother Amphitrite, had proved that she would be a doormat to no man on earth or in heaven.
‘Aunt Athena,’ she murmured languorously, lying along a wave and all prepared for confidences.
‘Don’t tell me,’ said Athena in a voice that knew everything and tolerated much of it. ‘You’re in love with that beach-bum.’ Raising her eyes to heaven, she slapped the squid hard against the rock and pronounced, ‘For youthful folly it is the most hopeless thing to entangle itself in empty imaginings. The more obstinately it clings to such unreal fantasies, the more certainly will humiliation overtake it.’ And then she patted Poseidon’s daughter kindly enough and saw her off with a firm admonition to look to her studies and develop herself.
That night, when he had drunk too well and was dreamy with retsina, Hanni the windsurfer wandered down to the shore and stretched his fine frame out on his surfboard. Flat on his back he watched the moon rise: his mouth was open, his hands dangled in the wavelets. Presently, lulled by the soft sound of the wind in the tamarisk trees, he fell into a deep sleep. Hidden by a wreath of sea-wrack, Poseidon's daughter gazed on him longingly, until at last, astonished by her own temerity, she tugged lightly at the prow and drew the board down from the sand until it floated entire in the shallows.
Now, of all the talents that the gods had apportioned to Poseidon’s daughter, the only one she had taken pains to nurture was the capacity to see into dreams. And so she lay below the board, watching, nibbling at Hanni’s fingertips like a hungry minnow. Meanwhile, Hanni dreamt on, oblivious: dreamt of a full sail, of waves like white stallions. Stealthily, so as not to wake him, Poseidon’s daughter pressed her wet lips to his dry ones, and hoisted herself on to the board, mouthing words of love. But in the dream she saw that the words blew like froth or spume from her lips, and seaweed streaked her white face, and Hanni shrank back from this apparition from the deeps and shuddered piteously in his sleep. Fearful that he would fall splashing into the shallows, Poseidon’s daughter steadied the board with her hand, until the dreamer sighed and settled again. The wind of the dream recovered and blew breath into the quickening sail, and now there was a woman with her straight back braced against the mast, but it was not she, not Poseidon’s daughter, not a thick-browed girl with stormy curls, but a woman of cool bones and superior deep eyes, and she knew then, most certainly, that this was the most perfect woman in the world. And as the dreamer stretched out his arms to the lovely paragon, Poseidon’s daughter dived ever deeper into the bitter waters of her jealousy, and she would have given all the world to wrap her own form around the woman like a cloak, so that it would be her face Hanni sought and her body his arms reached out to with such speechless longing.
Of all the skills the gods possessed, it was Zeus alone who knew the trick of snipping the rope that holds the dream to the dreamer. Once—or so her aunt Athena had told her—incensed by the intrusion of aeroplanes into the peaceful Attic skies, Zeus had made fearful mischief. Looking above him, he saw that each plane towed the dreams of its passengers behind it, like a trawler tows its netted catchy Inside the blond fuselage the travellers, having kicked off their shoes and bound velvet masks over their eyes, had slept their way across the troubled Gulf across Syria and Turkey, so that when the plane turned north-west and struck out across the Ionian Sea their dreams were in full flight—or rather in full dive- for although it is commonly believed that dreams rise up from the dreamer like word-balloons in a cartoon strip, the truth of the matter is that by their very nature they seek out those slower watery elements which blur boundaries and mix one thing up with another, and although, in these rapid times, few are the dreams that find err way there, those that do so live and leap most happily, like dolphins, in the shifting seas. So it happened that when Zeus took his silver scissors and snipped at the cords, the dreams were cast out across the sea and drifted there, higgledy-pigg edy, like waterskiers who have lost hold of their tow-rope, and the plane flew on with its perfectly straight jet-trail and its perfectly empty-headed passengers, nd some of the dreams Zeus seized by their tails and flung like thunderbolts, so that they fell into the orange groves of Lebanon or shrivelled unnoticed on the salt strands of the Red Sea. Only much later, when the passengers had scattered to their various destinations and slept several nights of empty sleep, did the dreams which survived swim blindly back towards their owners. But as fortune or Zeus would have it, there was no way of telling which dream belonged to a Catholic mission-nurse en route from Calcutta, and which to an investment analyst from Kyoto, so that the dreams were forced to seek parents quite at random, like orphaned penguin chicks on the rocky shelves of Patagonia. And Zeus, seeing the broker fall on his knees to ask forgiveness, and the angel-faced Sister take out options on holy relics, laughed so loud in his lemon grove that the rock of Kastro shivered, and cracks appeared in the stepped white streets of the village, and memorial urns fell marvellously asunder in the chapel. Or so her aunt Athena had told her; Athena who had no patience with capriciousness and who made no secret of her opinion that in all respects she was better suited than Zeus to command the company of the gods.