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:
But the Indian was so tough, he ran on cramping legs to make his pit stops, and ran back as if his life depended on it when his two minutes were almost up. And his partner in stubbornness was silent and still.
Oh Jesus we should have known . . . but Duke and I kept up the pretense, even though we only had a spare handful of onlookers who were perhaps too scared and awed to leave after witnessing what had to be a miracle.
On the fourth day, the Indian began to sway in place, a stalk straining against a killing wind. Duke was already ruined; the dealer had agreed to hold back payment until after the contest or three days, whichever came first. Duke admitted that to me on the fourth day, the day when he actually cried.
I mumbled something assuring, I can’t remember what.
The Indian fell at six-thirty; I have to hand it to him, he kept both palms against the camper as he slid down. The virgin white paint bore two streaks of pus and blood.
The crowd—all five of them—made no sound, save for a simultaneous taking-in and letting-out of breath that blended in with the fitful wind, and the sounds of morning birdcalls.
And still the woman stood.
Duke, ever the after-the-fact gentleman, walked up to her and began to say, “Congratulations—” when he stopped, bent down low enough to see under her waving hair . . . and dropped in a faint on the sand. I ran over to him, checked to make sure he was still alive, then approached the woman.
Under that gently shifting curtain of hair, she wore a smile on her face—and then I noticed that her eyes were all white, whiter than bone, but just as dead . . .
I made a tiny, strained noise in the back of my throat when I saw that silent, eternal smile, and as I tried to get to my feet I knocked into her—but she didn’t fall over.
She was cold and she was warm where the sun hit her, but she didn’t move, not at all. She defied gravity, she defied a rigged contest, and she defied death . . . after a fashion. But her prize, that camper she had died for, it was hers. And as the people standing near the diner figured out what had happened, and some woman screamed, I heard over and over in my head the woman's lone word:
“Mine.”
Duke was right; he was ruined. He lost the diner, because no one wanted the camper. Not because there was anything wrong with it. There wasn't. Still, it just wasn’t right, taking away a person’s hard-won property.
And, besides, the denim woman wouldn’t let anyone take it away. She never fell down. People were afraid to move her; after Duke lost the diner a couple of weeks later (our previously meager share of customers quit coming in), people chose to ignore the denim woman. People didn’t even care when I moved back into the diner after it had been closed three months; if anyone owned the building, or if any bank had repossessed it, no one came to check.
And she was still standing there. Her denim was tattered, and her skin leather hard. The paint was starting to blister on the sides of the camper, but it was all right by me. By her too, for all I knew. The wind still blew her hair, and the sun shone down on it each morning, just as it had.
With the passing of the days, the weeks, the months and years, she and her camper have changed. The denim, the flesh, the hair are gone, and the sides of her camper no longer gleam in the sun. Yet, the changes are good, and they are beautiful, as beautiful as she and it were in life.
They change, and I watch, and I have never demeaned her with name, or a fabricated history. Enough that there was a mountain that work of art called woman wanted, and enough that she used the only medium available to her to earn that mountain.
A good many years ago another woman who earned a mountain drove through and walked these deserts, and when she died her ashes were scattered in the dust of a place called Ghost Ranch. The beauty that she once was has become part of a beauty that endures. Dust unto dust beauty unto beauty . . . but oh, Georgia girl, you have company now . . .
Originless, like the sun, the sand, the scattered stones, the shifting wind the two skeletal shapes are joined on the desert; one metal, one a small frame of bone, and the winds which blow through the joined ribs of steel and chalky bone whisper something, a word of earning, a word of eternal possession—a word for the few times when God grants mortals their mountain.
THE SWORDSMAN WHOSE NAME WAS NOT DEATH
Ellen Kushner
Ellen Kushner is the author of two highly acclaimed novels, Swordspoint: A Melodrama of Manners and Thomas the Rhymer (winner of the 1991 World Fantasy Award). She has also published adventure books for children, short fiction and poetry in numerous anthologies and magazines, and edited the anthology Basilisk. To music fans Kushner is best known as the host (and script writer) for the International Music Series of classical music concerts broadcast across the country on American Public Radio, as well as the host of a weekly worldbeat music show on WGBH Radio in Boston. Also a performer of tradional folk music, she is currently working in collaboration with British folk singer June Tabor. Kushner lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.
Fans of Kushner’s dark and witty first novel, Swordspoint, will be glad to see Alec and his swordsman lover Richard St. Vier reappear in the following pages. Readers new to Kushner’s imaginary city of Riverside are in for a treat. “The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death” comes from the September issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.