Roger Zelazny - Donnerjack

“I know of this, and it was actually quite brief in real time.”

There followed a musical chuckle.

“I assure you,” it answered, “that the time in Virtu was real to those of sentience.”

“It was just an observation, not an attempt to belittle any who suffered. Were you present? A butterfly seems such a—fragile thing—in times such as that.”

Again, that laugh.

“If you ever have access to chronicles of those times, check out the name ‘Alioth.’ “

Donnerjack glanced at the piper.

“We have digressed somewhat,” he said.

“True. There was a company of deadly fighters Skyga had imagined. He brought them into being whenever he needed their services in battle.”

The piper skirled on and a hiss began to fall as Donnerjack shook his head.

“‘Imagined,’ you say?”

“Yes. As was customary with gods at the time of the Great Flux, he created what he needed by an act of strong imagination. They don’t go in for that much anymore. Too strenuous. But what he needed then was a deadly strike force.”

“He just imagined them and there they were?”

“Oh, no. Even a god requires some preparation. He had to imagine each one individually in advance, form and feature, fighting characteristics. He had to see them all as clearly as we see each other. Only then could he combine the imagining with his will to bring them into being on a battlefield.”

“Of course. And I suppose he could draw back the injured and send them forth again whole.”

“Yes, he could be a field hospital all by himself. They were magnificent, and the bright flame was their piper, D’Ambry. He did see action, too, of course, and he fought as well as the rest. Better, perhaps.”

“So what happened?”

“As events settled and the call to arms was heard with less frequency, their services were required less and less. Then, following one of the great final battles, Skyga called his troops home to sleep again in his memory. And they all went back in the blink of an eye, save for a lone piper on a hilltop.”

“Why not him?”

“One of life’s little mysteries. My guess is that he had something the others didn’t: his music. I think it gave him that extra measure of being that made him an individual rather than just a member of a company.”

“And so?”

“And so the company was summoned several times again, and it always appeared without its piper. It is said that for a time Skyga sought him unsuccessfully, but after a while the battles ended and he never called for them again. And the piper wanders now, looking for his lost legion. He pipes all over Virtu, calling to them.”

“Pity he cannot forget and find a new life for himself.”

“Who knows? Perhaps one day—”

Abruptly, the piping ceased. Donnerjack looked up to see the piper disappearing beyond the far side of his stony perch. He moved forward. The memories that man must have locked in his head! It would be a full education in the epistemology of Virtu to get him to talking.

Donnerjack rounded the stony outcrop, but the piper was nowhere in sight. He circled it again.

“Wolfer!” he called. “Wolfer Martin D’Ambry! I have to talk to you. Where are you?”

But there was no response.

When he returned to the place where he had been standing the black butterfly was no longer in sight either.

“Alioth?” he asked. “Are you still here?”

Again, he received no answer.

He backed away. Then, on an impulse, he activated his controls and soared. No sign of the piper, but he was impressed by the subtle changes in the terrain apparently in response to the music. Soft rises had grown steeper, steep ones craggier. The land about his perch had taken on a rawer look, as of earlier, rougher times.

Donnerjack descended and released his controls, restoring the normal drift program which permitted the landscape of Virtu to shift through the Great Stage. He could hard-holo or leave soft anything that came by. He left it at soft. Turning then, he departed into his own world.

Ayradyss could easily see the swell of her belly by the day that she finally met the banshee. For some time now, she and John had been in full-time residence at the castle, rarely leaving their Scottish island. Their privacy was a lover’s delight, but she knew it also served the practical purpose of keeping difficult questions about the origin of Donnerjack’s new wife to a minimum.

Ayradyss was in complete accord with John’s desire to keep her Virtu origin a secret. The masquerade would not need to be maintained forever. He had shown her his campaign for inserting data about her into Verite’s records—many of which were kept in Virtu. However, between drawing up the plans for Death’s palace and the occasional business of the Donnerjack Institute, he had put off actually beginning his campaign. She did not mind. Her experiences in Deep Fields, although poorly remembered, still haunted her. The isolated castle with its many ghosts and robots was society enough.

Still, sometimes she left the castle proper to walk near the ocean on a particular isolated, pebbly strand. The fisherfolk never came near this spot—the waves hid far too many rocks and the villagers lived far too intimately with wet and cold and the uneven temper of the sea to find the wild prospect at all enticing or romantic.

Ayradyss, however, enjoyed it and, as her pregnancy drew on, more and more often she took her exercise on the strand, well enough bundled to still the worried nagging of both the robots and ghosts. So it was that one foggy morning she met the banshee.

Ayradyss’s first impression was that one of the girls from the village had come to do her wash, but she dismissed that idea as ridiculous even before it fully formed. Who would do laundry in cold salt water when there were gas-powered washers and dryers aplenty in the village? Curious, she hurried closer, her shifting balance making her just a little clumsy on the round pebbled beach. Drawing alongside, she saw clearly that her initial, fantastical impression was apparently correct—the girl was indeed dipping bits of clothing in the salt waters of the inlet.

“Miss?” Ayradyss called out, wishing she had learned more of the local idiom—although she suspected what the ghosts could teach her would be centuries out of date. “Miss? Have you lost something? Can I help you?”

At the sound of Ayradyss’s voice the girl—no, woman—rose from where she had crouched by the water, and as she rose the clothing she had been washing vanished away, but not before Ayradyss caught a glimpse of what she was certain was a swatch of the Donnerjack tartan. When the woman turned to face her, Ayradyss could see why she had initially mistaken her for a girl, for she was terribly slender—a mere slip of a thing—yet there was strength in her and a strange intensity in her green-grey eyes.

Those green-grey eyes so drew her attention that Ayradyss had closed to easy speaking distance before she registered that the woman was very beautiful. Her straight silky hair, which fell nearly to her feet, was precisely the shade of moonbeams. Although her gown was simple, hardly more than a shift with a ribbon at the throat and a sash beneath her small, round breasts, the woman’s bearing was aristocratic, and aristocratic, too, were the fine, sharp bones of her face. Her hands showed no sign of the scrub maid’s work she had been about but were as long and slim as the rest of her, with shapely, perfect nails.

“You aren’t a woman of the village,” Ayradyss said, trying not to curtsy (after all, wasn’t she the lady of this land? wasn’t her husband laird of the castle?). “Pray, tell me, who are you?”

“I am the caoineag of this land, of the old lairds who built the first keeps of old upon whose dust your husband built a castle to be your home.”