After the King: Stories in Honor of J.R.R. Tolkien Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction by Jane Yolen

  Reave the Just by Stephen R. Donaldson

  Troll Bridge by Terry Pratchett

  A Long Night’s Vigil at the Temple by Robert Silverberg

  The Dragon of Tollin by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

  Faith by Poul and Karen Anderson

  In the Season of the Dressing of the Wells by John Brunner

  The Fellowship of the Dragon by Patricia A. McKillip

  The Decoy Duck by Harry Turtledove

  Nine Threads of Gold by Andre Norton

  The Conjure Man by Charles de Lint

  The Halfling House by Dennis L. McKiernan

  Silver or Gold by Emma Bull

  Up the Side of the Air by Karen Haber

  The Naga by Peter S. Beagle

  Revolt of the Sugar Plum Fairies by Mike Resnick

  Winter’s King by Jane Yolen

  Götterdämmerung by Barry N. Malzberg

  Down the River Road by Gregory Benford

  1. Going Ashore

  2. Confusion Winds

  3. The Zom

  4. Mr. Preston

  5. The Frozen Girl

  6. Going Upback

  7. Temporal Turbulence

  8. The Eating Ice

  9. Cairo

  10. Zom Master

  11. The Past is Labyrinth

  12. Whorl

  13. Pursuit

  14. The Whorehouse

  Death and the Lady by Judith Tarr

  I.

  II.

  III.

  About the Authors

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  Jane Yolen

  Sometimes it is difficult to remember that there were fantasy books written before J. R. R. Tolkien’s work burst onto the literary scene. Yet there were landmark volumes, stories of childhood, such as The Wind in the Willows and The Jungle Books. There were adult books of mythic proportion such as The Well at the World’s End and of Gothic proportion such as Dracula and the delicious anachronisms of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. There were family fantasy books to be shared at the hearthside by well-known writers like Charles Dickens and unknown mathematicians such as the Reverend Charles Dodgson.

  The history of literature is a mindfield of fantasy books.

  But what John Ronald Reuel Tolkien created at his typewriter in his garage study, this “great but dilatory and unmethodical man” as his friend C. S. Lewis called him, was the phenomenon of fantasy as market genre.

  He thought that he was only making up a world, peopling it, chronicling its lineages and laws. Middle-earth, he always insisted, was not an allegory. In fact he loathed allegory. And though he was a critic and a professor, he abhorred the symbol-hunting that went on about his books. He came down firmly and finally on the side of pure storytelling. What he forgot was that, as a god, he might create a universe, but then that universe would, clockworklike, go on without him.

  I am too old to have read Tolkien as a child, but I first heard about his books from a British friend. And then I read about them in Peter Beagle’s delightful book about his ride across America on a motorcycle—I See By My Outfit. When my husband and I decided to camp across Europe and the Middle East for as long as our money held out in 1965 and 1966, I got hold of a hardcover British edition of The Lord of the Rings and read it as we sailed to England on the Castel Felice. While the other passengers danced to the music of “Anastasio E Sui Happy Boys,” I devoured the books. Ten days later, when we docked in Southampton, it did not surprise me in the slightest that the houses all looked like hobbit holes and I restrained myself—but barely—from asking a publican to take off his shoes so I might examine the tops of his feet for hair.

  As changed as I was by my first reading of Tolkien, I was only a microcosm of the changes wrought on writers in general and fantasy writers in particular, for after the success of The Lord of the Rings, there was a rush to profit. Publishers and booksellers together invented the market for fantasy as a genre. Fantasy writers became—like it or not (and it must be admitted that there are some fantasy writers who despise Tolkien and vociferously distance themselves from his influence)—a Post-Tolkien Fellowship. We wrote books whose very natures proclaimed them to be Tolkienesque: books marked by the mythic quality of the stories, the background of saga and folklore, the often pastoral and/or pseudo-medieval setting, and the underlying assumption that magic has consequences as surely as the ring carried to the dark mountain wore down its wearer. And whether or not the influences went well beyond Tolkien, back to the misty dark ages of myth, folktale, legend and the like, the books all carried apothegms (printed or assumed) declaring “In the style of J. R. R. Tolkien.”

  Of course given such parameters, what began in grace and power easily degenerated into a kind of mythic silliness—elves in fur loincloths, pastel unicorns, coy talking swords, and a paint-by-number medieval setting with the requisite number of dirty inns, evil wizards, and gentle hairy-footed beings of various sexual persuasions. Tolkien would not have been amused.

  Amused? He would have been horrified.

  Still, amidst the post-1960s flood of Post-Tolkien fantasy writing, a few authors stand out, writing the kinds of stories that Tolkien himself might have looked favorably on and enjoyed. Writers like Andre Norton, the queen of the fantasy adventure novel; and Poul Anderson who set his own thumbprints on the mythic North; and Robert Silverberg that protean storyteller; and Peter S. Beagle whose debt to Tolkien was so unabashedly limned in his nonfiction book and the splendid few—too few—novels that followed. They, and the other wonderful authors in this volume, were asked specifically to write a Tolkienesque story, not in imitation of the master—for none of us are imitators—but in honor of his work. A birthday volume, a festschrift, a present for the 100th anniversary of his birth—and for his many readers.

  We hope those same readers will feel about these stories as did the electrician at Oxford who was called to repair some wiring in the English Faculty Library. Noticing the bust of Tolkien, he put down his tools and walked over to it and clapped an arm companionably around the bronze shoulder. Then, speaking to it unembarrassed, as if talking to a dear old friend, he said, “Well done, Professor! You’ve written a smashing good yarn.”

  —Jane Yolen

  Phoenix Farm

  April 1991

  Reave the Just

  Stephen R. Donaldson

  Of all the strange, unrelenting stories which surrounded Reave the Just, none expressed his particular oddness of character better than that concerning his kinsman, Jillet of Forebridge.

  Part of the oddness was this—that Reave and Jillet were so unlike each other that the whole idea of their kinship became difficult to credit.

  Let it be said without prejudice that Jillet was an amiable fool. No one who was not amiable would have been loved by the cautious people of Forebridge—and Jillet was loved, of that there could be no doubt. Otherwise the townsfolk would never have risked the unpredictable and often spectacular consequences of sending for Reave, merely to inform him that Jillet had disappeared. And no one who was not a fool would have gotten himself into so much trouble with Kelven Divestulata that Kelven felt compelled to dispose of him.

  In contrast, neither Reave’s enemies—of which his exploits had attracted a considerable number—nor his friends would have described him as amiable.

  Doubtless there were villages across the North Counties, towns perhaps, possibly a city or two, where Reave the Just was admired, even adulated: Forebridge was not among th
em. His decisions were too wild, his actions too unremitting, to meet the chary approval of the farmers and farriers, millers and masons who had known Jillet from birth.

  Like a force of nature, he was so far beyond explanation that people had ceased trying to account for him. Instead of wondering why he did what he did—or how he got away with it—the men and women of Forebridge asked themselves how such an implausible individual chanced to be kinsman to Jillet, who was himself only implausible in the degree to which likable character was combined with unreliable judgment.

  In fact, no one knew for certain that Reave and Jillet were related. Just recently, Jillet had upon occasion referred to Reave as, “Reave the Just, my kinsman.” That was the true extent of the information available in Forebridge. Nothing more was revealed on the subject. In an effort to supply the lack, rumor or gossip suggested that Jillet’s mother’s sister, a woman of another town altogether, had fallen under the seduction of a carnival clown with delusions of grandeur—or, alternatively, of a knight errant incognito—and had given Reave a bastard birth under some pitiful hedgerow, or perhaps in some nameless nunnery, or conceivably in some lord’s private bedchamber. But how the strains of blood which could produce Reave had been so entirely suppressed in Jillet, neither rumor nor gossip knew.

  Still it must have been true that Reave and Jillet were related. When Reave was summoned in Jillet’s name, he came.

  By the time Reave arrived, however, Jillet was beyond knowing whether anyone valued him enough to tell his kinsman what had become of him.

  How he first began to make his way along the road to Kelven’s enmity was never clearly known. Very well, he was a fool, as all men knew—but how had he become enmeshed in folly on this scale? A few bad bargains with usurers were conceivable. A few visits to the alchemists and mages who fed on the fringes of towns like Forebridge throughout the North Counties were conceivable, in fact hardly to be wondered at, especially when Jillet was at the painful age where he was old enough. to want a woman’s love but too young to know how to get it. A few minor and ultimately forgettable feuds born of competition for trade or passion were not only conceivable but normal. Had not men and women been such small and harmless fools always? The folk of Forebridge might talk of such matters endlessly, seeking to persuade themselves that they were wiser. But who among them would have hazarded himself against Kelven Divestulata? Indeed, who among them had not at one time or another suspected that Kelven was Satan Himself, thinly disguised by swarthy flesh and knotted muscle and wiry beard?

  What in the name of all the saints had possessed Jillet to fling himself into such deep waters?

  The truth—which no one in Forebridge ever divined—was that Jillet brought his doom down on his own head by the simple expedient of naming himself Reave’s kinsman.

  It came about in this fashion. In his early manhood, Jillet fell victim to an amiable, foolish, and quite understandable passion for the widow Huchette. Before his death, Rudolph Huchette had brought his new bride—foreign, succulent, and young—to live in the manor-house now occupied by Kelven Divestulata, thinking that by keeping her far from the taints and sophistication of the cities he could keep her pure. Sadly for him, he did not live long enough after settling in Forebridge to learn that his wife was pure by nature and needed no special protection. And of course the young men of the town knew nothing of her purity. They only knew that she was foreign, young, and bereaved, imponderably delicious. Jillet’s passion was only one among many, ardent and doomed. The widow Huchette asked only of the God who watched over innocence that she be left alone.

  Needless to say, she was not.

  Realistically considered, the only one of her admirers truly capable of disturbing her was dour Kelven. When she spurned his advances, he laid siege to her with all the cunning bitterness of his nature. Over the course of many months, he contrived to install himself in the manor-house which Rudolph had intended as her lifelong home; he cut off her avenues of escape so that her only recourse was to accept the drudgery of being his housekeeper since she steadfastly refused the grim honor of being his wife. And even there he probably had the best of her, since he was no doubt perfectly capable of binding and raping her to satisfy his admiration.

  However, Jillet and the other men enamored of the widow did not consider her circumstances—and their own—realistically. As men in passion will, they chose to believe that they themselves were the gravest threat to her detachment. Blind to Kelven’s intentions, Jillet and his fellow fools went about in a fog of schemes, dreaming of ways to persuade her to reveal her inevitable preference for themselves.

  However, Jillet carried this scheming further than most—but by no means all—of his peers.

  Perhaps because of his amiability—or perhaps because he was foolish—he was not ordinarily successful in competitions over women. His face and form were goodly enough, and his brown eyes showed pleasure as openly as any man’s. His kindness and cheery temper endeared him throughout Forebridge. But he lacked forthrightness, self-assertion; he lacked the qualities which inspired passion. As with women everywhere, those of Forebridge valued kindness; they were fond of it; but they did not surrender their virtue to it. They preferred heroes—or rogues.

  So when Jillet first conceived his passion for the widow Huchette, he was already accustomed to the likelihood that he would not succeed.

  Like Kelven Divestulata after the first year or so of the widow’s bereavement—although no one in Forebridge knew at the time what Kelven was doing—Jillet prepared a siege. He was not wise enough to ask himself, Why am I not favored in the beds of women? What must I learn in order to make myself desirable? How may I rise above the limitations which nature has placed upon me? Instead, he asked, Who can help me with this woman?

  His answer had already occurred to a handful of his brighter, but no less foolish, fellows. In consequence, he was no better than the fifth or sixth man of Forebridge to approach the best-known hedgerow alchemist in the County, seeking a love-potion.

  According to some authorities, the chief distinction between alchemists and mages was that the former had more opportunities for charlatanism, at less hazard. Squires and earls consulted mages: plowmen and cotters, alchemists. Certainly, the man whom Jillet approached was a charlatan. He admitted as much freely in the company of folk who were wise enough not to want anything from him. But he would never have revealed the truth about himself to one such as Jillet.

  Charlatan or not, however, he was growing weary of this seemingly endless sequence of men demanding love-potions against the widow Huchette. One heartsick swain by the six-month or so may be profitably bilked. Three may be a source of amusement. But five or six in a season was plainly tedious. And worrisome as well: even Forebridge was capable of recognizing charlatanism when five or six love-potions failed consecutively.

  “Go home,” the alchemist snapped when he had been told what Jillet wanted. “The ingredients for the magick you require are arduous and expensive to obtain. I cannot satisfy you.”

  But Jillet, who could not have put his hand on five farthings at that moment, replied, “I care nothing for the price. I will pay whatever is needed.” The dilemma of cost had never entered his head, but he was certain it could be resolved. The widow Huchette had gold enough, after all.

  His confidence presented an entirely different dilemma to the alchemist. It was not in the nature of charlatans to refuse money. And yet too many love-potions had already been dispensed. If Providence did not inspire the widow to favor one of the first four or five men, the alchemist’s reputation—and therefore his income—would be endangered. Perhaps even his person would be endangered.

  Seeking to protect himself, the alchemist named a sum which should have stunned any son of a cotter.

  Jillet was not stunned. Any sum was acceptable, since he had no prospect of ever paying it himself. “Very well,” he said comfortably. Then, because he wished to believe in his own cleverness, he added, “But if the potion does not succee
d, you will return that sum with interest.”

  “Oh, assuredly,” replied the alchemist, who found that he could not after all refuse money. “All of my magicks succeed, or I will know the reason why. Return tomorrow. Bring your gold then.”

  He closed his door so that Jillet would not have a chance to change his mind.

  Jillet walked home musing to himself. Now that he had time to consider the matter, he found that he had placed himself in an awkward position. True, the love of the widow Huchette promised to be a valuable investment—but it was an investment only, not coin. The alchemist would require coin. In fact, the coin was required in order to obtain the investment. And Jillet had no coin, not on the scale the alchemist had mentioned. The truth was that he had never laid mortal eyes on that scale of coin.

  And he had no prospects which might be stretched to that scale, no skills which could earn it, no property which could be sold for it.

  Where could a man like Jillet of Forebridge get so much money?

  Where else?

  Congratulating himself on his clarity of wit, Jillet went to the usurers.

  He had had no dealings with usurers heretofore. But he had heard rumors. Some such “lenders” were said to be more forgiving than others, less stringent in their demands. Well, Jillet had no need of anyone’s forgiveness; but he felt a natural preference for men with amiable reputations. From the honest alchemist, he went in search of an amiable usurer.

  Unfortunately, amiable, forgiving usurers had so much kindness in their natures because they could afford it; and they could afford it because their investments were scantly at risk: they demanded collateral before hazarding coin. This baffled Jillet more than a little. The concept of collateral he could understand—just—but he could not understand why the widow Huchette did not constitute collateral. He would use the money to pay the alchemist; the alchemist would give him a love-potion; the potion would win the widow; and from the widow’s holdings the usurer would be paid. Where was the fallacy in all this?