Ellen Datlow - Tails of Wonder and Imagination

From the first day of my service to Watkin he insisted that I tell him my dreams each morning. “Dreams are the manner in which those who mean you harm infiltrate the defenses of you existence,” he told me during a thunderstorm. It was mid-august, and we stood, dry, beneath the spreading branches of a hemlock one afternoon as a hard rain fell in curtains around us. That night, in sleep, I followed a woman through a field of purple flowers that eventually sloped down to the edge of a cliff. Below, an enormous mound of black rock heaved as if breathing, and when it expanded I could see through cracks and fissures red and orange light radiating out from within. The dream woman looked over her shoulder and said, “Do you remember the day you came to serve the wizard?”

Then the light was in my eyes and I was surprised to find I was awake. Watkin, holding a lantern up to my face said, “It’s perished. Come quickly.” He spun away from the bed, casting me in shadow again. I trembled as I dressed. I’d seen the old man pull, with his teeth, the spirit of a spitting demon from the nostril of one of the ladies of court. Unfathomable. His flowered robe was a brilliant design of peonies in the snow, but I no longer trusted the sun.

I stepped into the work room as Watkin was clearing things from the huge table at which he mixed his powders and dissected the reptiles whose small brains had a region that when mashed and dried quickened his potions. “Fetch your pen and paper,” he said. “We will record everything.” I did as I was told and then helped him. At one point he tried to lift a large crystal globe of blue powder and his thin wrists shook with the exertion. I took it from him just as it slipped from his fingers.

Suddenly, everywhere, the scent of roses and cinnamon. The wizard sniffed the air, and warned me that its arrival was imminent. Six hunters carried the corpse, draped across three battle stretchers, and covered by the frayed tapestry of the War of the Willows which had hung in the corridor that ran directly from the Treasury to the Pity Fountain. Watkin and I stood back as the dark bearded men grunted, gritted their teeth, and hoisted the stretchers onto the table. As they filed out of our chambers, my master handed each of them a small packet of powder tied up with a ribbon—an aphrodisiac, I suspected. Before collecting his reward and leaving, the last of the hunters took the edge of the tapestry, and lifting the corner high, walked swiftly around the table, unveiling the Manticore.

I glanced for a mere sliver and instinctually looked away. While my eyes were averted, I heard the old man purr, squeal, chitter. The thick cloud of the creature’s scent was a weight on my shoulders, and then I noticed the first buzz of the flies. The wizard slapped my face and forced me to look. His grip on the back of my neck could not be denied.

It was crimson and shades of crimson. And after I noted the color, I saw the teeth and looked at nothing else for a time. Both a wince and a smile. I saw the lion paws, the fur, the breasts, that long beautiful hair. The tail of shining segments led to a smooth, sharp stinger—a green bubble of venom at its tip. “Write this down,” said Watkin. I fumbled for my pen. “ Female Manticore ,” he said. I wrote at the top of the page.

The wizard took one step that seemed to last for minutes. Then he took another and another, until he was pacing slowly around the table, studying the creature from all sides. In his right hand he held the cane with the wizard’s head carved into the head of it. Its tip was not touching the floor. “Draw it,” he commanded. I set to the task, but this was a skill I was deficient at. Still, I drew it—the human head and torso, the powerful body of a lion, the tail of the scorpion. It turned out to be my best drawing, but it too was terrible.

“The first time I saw one of these,” Watkin said, “I was with my class as a boy. We’d gone on a walk to the lake, and we’d just passed through an orchard and onto a large meadow with yellow flowers. My teacher, a woman named Levu, with a mole beside her lip, pointed into the distance, one hand on my shoulder, and whispered, ‘A husband and wife Manticore, look.’ I saw them, blurs of crimson, grazing the low hanging fruit by the edge of the meadow. On our way back to town that evening, we heard their distinctive trill and then were attacked by two of them. They each had three rows of teeth chewing perfectly in sync. I watched them devour the teacher as she frantically confessed to me. While I prayed for her, the monsters recited poems in an exotic tongue and licked the blood from their lips.”

I wrote down all of what Watkin said, although I wasn’t sure it was to the point. He never looked me in the eye, but moved slowly, slowly, around the thing, lightly prodding it with his cane, squinting with one eye into the darkness of its recesses. “Do you see the face?” he asked me. I told him I did. “But for that fiendish smile, she’s beautiful,” he said. I tried to see her without the smile and what I saw in my mind was the smile without her. Suffice to say, her skin was crimson as was her fur, her eyes yellow diamonds. Her long hair had its own mind, deep red-violet whips at her command. And then that smile.

“She lived next to me, with hair as long as this but golden,” Watkin said, pointing. “I, a little younger than you, she a little older. Only once we went out together into the desert and climbed down into the dunes. Underground there, in the ruins, we saw the stone carved face of the hunch monkey. We lay down in front of it together, kissed, and went to sleep. Our parents and neighbors were looking for us. Late in the night while she slept, a wind blew through the pursed lips of the stone face, warning me of treachery and time . When she woke, she said in sleep she’d visited the ocean and gone fishing with a Manticore. The next time we kissed was at our wedding.”

“Draw that,” he shouted. I did my best, but didn’t know whether to depict the Manticore or the wizard with her at the beach. “One more thing about the smile,” he said. “It continually, perpetually grinds with the organic rotary mechanism of a well-lubricated jaw and three sets of teeth—even after death, in the grave, it masticates the pitch black.”

“Should I draw that?” I asked.

He’d begun walking. A few moments later, he said, “No.”

He laid down his cane on the edge of the table and took one of the paws in both his hands. “Look here at this claw,” he said. “How many heads do you think it’s taken off?” “Ten,” I said. “Ten thousand,” he said, dropping the paw and retrieving his cane. “How many will it take off now?” he asked. I didn’t answer. “The lion is fur, muscle, tendon, claw and speed, five important ingredients of the unfathomable. Once a king of Dreesha captured and tamed a brood of Manticore. He led them into battles on long, thousand link, iron chains. They cut through the forward ranks of the charging Igridots with the artful tenacity his royal highness reserves for only the largest pastries.”

“Take this down?” I asked.

“To the last dribbling vowel,” he said, nodding and slowly moving. His cane finally tapped the floor. “Supposedly,” he said, “there’s another smaller organ floating within their single chambered heart. At the center of this small organ is a smaller ball of gold—the purest gold imaginable. So pure it could be eaten. And if it were, I am told the result is one million beautiful dreams of flying.

“I had an uncle,” said the wizard, “who hunted the creature, bagged one, cut out its ball of gold, and proceeded to eat the entire thing in one bound. After that, my uncle was sane only five times a day. Always, he had his hands up. His tongue was always wagging, his eyes shivering. He walked away from home one night when no one was watching. He wandered into the forest. There were reports for a while of a ragged holy man but then a visitor returned his ring and watch and told us his head had been found. Once it was safely under glass, I performed my first magic on it and had it tell me about its final appointment with a Manticore.