The Avram Davidson Treasury (36 page)

Then, “I thought it would be bigger,” he said.

“Return, One-Eye, or you will be killed,” the old one said. “Outside is not for you. Return… Not that way! That way is a death thing. Mark it well.
This
way. Go. And be quick—there may be dogs.”

There was sometimes a new one to instruct, blood wet in the socket, at the place of water, to drink his fill and then fill his mouth and go to the Fathers and Mothers, not to swallow a drop, to learn the long way and the turnings, down and down in the darkness, past the Keeper, mouth to mouth to the Fathers and Mothers. Again and again.

“Why are
They
bound?” a new one asked.

“Why are
we
half-blinded? It is The Race which orders. It is The Race which collects the food that other One-Eyes bring to Keeper, and he stores it and feeds Them.”

“Why?”

They paused, water dripping from above into the pool.
Why?
To eat and drink must be or else death. But why does The Race order Fathers and Mothers to be bound so that they cannot find their own food and water? “I am only a stupid One-Eye. But I think the Fathers and Mothers would tell me… There was mention of a secret thing… The Keeper would not let me listen after that …”

“That is a big Keeper, and his teeth are sharp!”

Water fell in gouts from overhead and splashed into the pool. They filled their mouths and started down. When he had emptied the last drop in his mouth he whispered, “Mother, I would hear the secret thing.”

She stiffened. Then she clutched at him. The other Fathers and Mothers ceased speaking and moving. At the entrance the Keeper sat up. “What is it?” he called. There was alarm in his voice, and it quavered.

“A strange sound,” said a Father. “Keeper, listen!” Then—“Slaves?” he whispered.

The Keeper moved his head from side to side. The Fathers and Mothers were all quite still. “I hear nothing,” Keeper said, uncertainly.

“Keeper, you are old, your senses are dulled,” the deep-voiced Father said. “We say there is a strange noise! There is danger! Go and see—go now!”

The Keeper became agitated. “I may not leave,” he protested. “It is The Race which orders me to stay here—”

Fathers and Mothers together cried out at him. “The Race! The Race! We are The Race! Go and find out the danger to Us!”

“The One-Eye-where is the One-Eye? I will send him!” But they cried that the One-Eye had left (as, indeed, one of them had), and so, finally, gibbering and muttering, he lumbered up the passageway.

As soon as he had left, the milk-voiced Mother began to caress and stroke the One-Eye, saying that he was clever and good, that his breath was sweet, that—

“There is no time for that, Mother,” she was interrupted. “Tell him the secret. Quick! Quick!”

“Before you were made a One-Eye and were set apart to serve Us, with whom did you first mate?” she asked.

“With the sisters in my own litter, of course.”

“Of course…for they were nearest. And after that, with the mother of your own litter. Your sire was perhaps an older brother. After that you would have mated with daughters, with aunts …”

“Of course.”

The Mother asked if he did not know that this incessant inbreeding could eventually weaken The Race.

“I did not know.”

She lifted her head, listened. “The stupid Keeper is not returning yet. Good… It is so, One-Eye. Blindness, deafness, deformation, aborting, madness, still-births. All these occur from time to time in every litter. And when flaw mates with flaw and no new blood enters the line, The Race weakens. Is it not so, Fathers and Mothers?”

They answered, “Mother, it is so.”

The One-Eye asked, “Is this, then, the secret? A Father told me that the secret was a good thing, and this is a bad thing.”

Be silent, They told him, and listen.

In her milk-rich voice the Mother went on, “But
We
are not born of the same litter,
We
are not sib, not even near kin. From time to time there is a choosing made of the strongest and cleverest of many litters. And out of these further selections. And then a final choosing—eight, perhaps, or ten, or twelve. With two, or at most, three males to be Fathers, and the rest females. And these, the chosen of the best of the young, are taken to a place very far from the outside, very safe from danger, and a Keeper set to guard them, and One-Eyes set apart to bring them food and water …”

A Father continued the story. “It is of Ourselves that We are talking. They bound Us together, tied Us tightly with many knots, tail to tail together, so that it was impossible to run away. We had no need to face danger above, no need to forage. We had only to eat, to drink, to grow strong—and you see that we are far larger than you—and to mate. All this as The Race has ordered.”

“I see… I did not know. This is a good thing, yes. It is wise.”

The Mothers and Fathers cried out at this. “It is not good!” They declared. “It is not wise! It is not right! To bind Us together when We were young and unknowing was well, yes. But to keep Us bound now is not well. We, too, would walk freely about! We would see the goldshining and the slaves, not to stay bound in the dimness here!”

“One-Eye!” They cried. “You were set apart to serve Us—”

“Yes,” he muttered. “I will bring water.”

But this was not what They wanted of him. “One-Eye,” They whispered, “good, handsome, clever, young, sweet-breathed One-Eye. Set Us free! Unloose the knots! We cannot reach them, you can reach them—”

He protested. “I dare not!”

Their voices rose angrily. “You must! It is The Race which orders! We would rule and We will rule and you will rule with Us!”

“…mate with Us!” In his ear, a Mother’s voice. He shivered.

Again, they spoke in whispers, hissing. “See, One-Eye, you must know where there are death places and food set out which must not be eaten. Bring such food here, set it down. We will know. We will see that Keeper eats it, when he returns. Then, One-Eye, then—”

Suddenly, silence.

All heads were raised.

A Father’s deep voice was shrill with fear. “That is smoke!”

But another Father said, “The Race will see that no harm comes to Us.” And the others all repeated his assurance. They moved to and fro, in Their odd, circumscribed way, a few paces to each side, and around, and over each other, and back. They were waiting.

It seemed to the One-Eye that the smoke grew thicker. And a Mother said, “While We wait, let Us listen for Keeper and for the steps of those The Race will send to rescue Us. Meanwhile, you, One-Eye, try the knots. Test the knots, see if you can set Us free.”

“What is this talk of ‘try’ and ‘test’ and ‘see’?” a Father then demanded. “He has only to act and it is done! Have We not discussed this amongst Ourselves, always, always? Are We not agreed?”

A second Mother said, “It is so. The One-Eye has freedom, full freedom of movement, while We have not; he can reach the knots and We can not. Come, One-Eye. Act. And while you set Us free, We will listen, and when We are free, We will not need to wait longer for Keeper and the others. Why do they not come?” she concluded, querulous and uncertain.

And they cried to him to untie Them, set Them free, and great things would be his with Them; and, “If not,” They shrilled, “We will kill you!”

They pushed him off and ordered him to begin. The smell of the smoke was strong.

Presently he said, “I can do nothing. The knots are too tight.”

“We will kill you!” they clamored. “It is not so! We are agreed it is not!” And again and again he tried, but could do nothing.

“Listen, Mothers and Fathers,” the milk-voiced one said. “There is no time. No one comes. The Race has abandoned Us. There must be danger to them; rather than risk, they will let Us die and then they will make another choosing for new Mothers and Fathers.”

Silence. They listened, strained, snuffed the heavy air.

Then, screaming, terrified, the others leaped up, fell back, tumbling over each other. A Mother’s voice—soft, warm, rich, sweet—spoke. “There is one thing alone. Since the knots will not loose, they must be severed. One-Eye! Your teeth. Quickly! Now!”

The others crouched and cringed, panting. The One-Eye sank his teeth into the living knot, and, instantly a Father screamed and lunged forward, cried stop.

“That is pain!” he whimpered. “I have not felt pain before, I cannot bear it. Keeper will come, the others will save Us, The Race—”

And none would listen to the Mother.

“Mother, I am afraid,” the One-Eye said. “The smoke is thicker.”

“Go, then, save yourself,” she said.

“I will not leave without you.”

“I? I am part of the whole. Go. Save yourself.”

But still he would not, and again he crept up to her.

They came at last to the end of the passage. They could not count the full number of the dead. The smoke was gone now. The Mother clung to him with her fore limbs. Her hind limbs dragged. She was weak, weak from the unaccustomed labor of walking, weak from the trail of thick, red blood she left behind from the wound which set her free.

“Is this outside?” she asked.

“I think so. Yes, it must be. See! Overhead—the goldshining! The rest I do not know,” the One-Eye answered.

“So that is the goldshining. I have heard—Yes, and the rest, I have heard, too. Those are the houses of the slaves and there are the fields the slaves tend, and from which they make the food which they store up for Us. Come help me, for I must go slowly; and we will find a place for Us. We will mate, for We are now The Race.” Her voice was like milk. “And our numbers will not end.”

He said, “Yes, Mother. Our numbers will not end.”

With his single eye he scanned Outside—the Upper World of the slaves who thought themselves masters, who, with trap and terrier and ferret and poison and smoke, warred incessantly against The Race. Did they think that even this great slaughter was victory? If so, they were deceived. It had only been a skirmish.

The slaves were slaves still; the tail-tied ones were kings.

“Come, Mother,” he said. And, slowly and painfully, and with absolute certainty, he and his new mate set out to take possession of the world.

I
NTRODUCTION BY
H
ENRY
W
ESSELLS

Astronomers had speculated about the existence of Pluto long before the planet was discovered in 1930: Even while it remained unseen, its influence on comets could be observed. “The Price of a Charm; or The Lineaments of Gratified Desire” is the story of one of the key events of the twentieth century, and it is all the more powerful for being extremely subtle. It is the account of a meeting between Old Steven, a maker of charms for success in the hunt or in love, and a younger man, Gabriel (or Gavrilo), who is a…fanatic. This brief, shattering tale (first published as “Price of a Charm” in 1963) is right at the core of an issue that is very much in the public eye (again) as I write this in 1996. The story will always be unsettling and timely, whatever the headlines may read.

The paradox of Avram Davidson’s writing is that the unspoken, unwritten words matter as much as those actually on the page. In “There Beneath the Silky-Tree and Whelmed in Deeper Gulphs Than Me,” there is a wonderful description of Jack Limekiller’s first response to the peculiar economy of British Hidalgo
:

…
and he had the flashing thought that somehow he might help fill those holes; he was a while in finding out that this amounted to hoping to fill the holes in a piece of lace: the holes were part of the pattern.

This is also a description of Avram’s writing. His strategy of narration by omission is nowhere so clear as in this story (only “Naples” comes close). Avram doesn’t use the overheated rhetoric of the horror writer; his omissions have nothing in common with latter-day minimalists whose world is narrow and monotone. What Avram writes is enough: he demands of us that we make connections he himself made, so that we reach the point where we know why his one or two clues are sufficient to evoke the entire history of Europe. I am
not
writing an explanation of this story, so I too must omit two or three words that Avram chose to leave out; for explanations, see my comprehensive survey, “A Preliminary Annotated Checklist of the Writings of Avram Davidson” in the
Bulletin of Bibliography
(vol. 53, issues 1 & 2 [1996]).

THE PRICE OF A CHARM; OR, THE LINEAMENTS OF GRATIFIED DESIRE

T
HE MOUNTAIN AIR WAS
clear and sweet, scented with wild herbs, and although the young man had come quite a distance, he was not at all tired. The cottage—it was really little more than a hut—was just as it had been described to him; clearly, many people in the district had had occasion to visit it.

At one side a tiny spring poured over a lip of rock and crossed the path beneath a rough culvert. At the other side was a row of beehives. A goat and her kid grazed nearby, and a small black sow ate from a heap of acorns with a meditative air.

A man with white hair got up from the bench and held out his hand. “A guest,” he said. “A stranger. No matter—a guest, all the same. Everyone who passes by is my guest, and the toll I charge is that I make them drink with me.”

He laughed; his laugh was infectious, and the young man laughed too—though his sallow, sullen face was not that of one who laughed often.

The hand he shook was hard and callused. “I am called Old Stevan,” the peasant said. “It used to be Black Stevan, but that was a long time ago. Even my mustache is white now—” he stroked its length affectionately—“except for here, in the middle. I am always smoking tobacco. Smoking and drinking, who can live without them?”

He excused himself, and returned almost at once with bottle, two glasses, and cigarettes.

“I do not usually—” the young visitor began, with a frown which seemed familiar to his face.

“If you do not smoke, you do not smoke. But I allow only Moslems to refuse a drink. One drink—a mere formality.”