Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume 5 An anthology of stories

She could barely speak. “Who made these? Where did you get them?”

He shook his head.

She spoke. He listened. He found words at need. When he was alone, he thought only in the words that she would understand. To look, to feel, needed no words. What she wanted, and what she gave. What he could give her now.

“I am not young,” he would murmur regretfully into her hair. His speech was broken, oddly accented and missing words, but that phrase he knew. “Sorry. I am not beautiful now.”

She wanted to tell him men were not supposed to be beautiful, but “You are to me,” she’d say, speaking the truth.

He spread his hands open, lacking the words to argue, just laughing ruefully, as though that were refutation enough.

“You see me,” she explained doggedly, wanting to convince him. “And I see you.”

He stiffened against her embrace, as though she’d angered or insulted him; but she waited, and he relaxed again, melting against her bones.

“You not know me,” he muttered.

“True. It’s funny that you make me happy.”

“Funny laughing?”

“No.” She chuckled. “Well, a little. Funny—” She tickled him, and delighted to feel him squirm like a child— “Funny like strange.”

“I am stranger.”

“Yes,” she said; “you are that.”

He knew that she had brought him back to life. When he felt the sun on his arms, when he smelt sage and lavender and rosemary as he turned the earth in her garden, when he smiled because she called to him across the yard, he knew he owed her everything. She remade the world.

When he gave her joy, sometimes in his own release he’d howl like a woman in childbirth. She had witnessed that sort of pain enough that it scared her. But she learned that it was over a moment later. Herself, in joy, she sang: long, loud summer and midwinter carols she hadn’t known her throat was capable of.

“Why don’t you sing?” she asked him bravely once, her face buried in the fold between his armpit and his chest. It took him a long time to understand her—and then he answered, “Most men don’t.”

Once, though, he shouted out a word—screamed it, pleading with his body and the night before he fell down onto her, dense and heavy as clay. She tried to hold him, but he rolled away from her, shielding himself with palms outturned, warding off something only he could see.

She said, “My love?” and he gasped, “Yes, words—words to me, please—”and, baffled, she started to sing, a silly children’s song about a goat on a hillside. He drew in deep breaths, asked her a question about what a line meant, and was himself again.

The word he’d kept shouting out was his own language. Was it a name, perhaps? As sometimes she cried out his in her pleasure?

The next day, while she swept out the cottage and pounded herbs into paste at her workbench, she thought about the fact that there had been others. Others before her. Did she mind that she was not his first love, though he was hers? Did she care? She cared a little, she decided. She did not like to think of him loving someone else. But it was entirely unreasonable to mind .

“My hair, so white—”

“I like it. Was it darker once?”

“Yes. More darker, yes. Old, now. Bad.”

“You are not bad. The goats like you. You take very good care of them.”

“Goats….”

“Say it. Say, ‘I am good.’”

“I am goat.”

“No, good.”

“You. Are. Good.”

It couldn’t last, and she knew it couldn’t last. It was her life, after all, to be woken at all hours, to be summoned urgently to human horrors and discomforts; even he couldn’t change that. When the knocking and shouting outside the door began, smashing their bubble of dark and cozy sleep, she rolled over, untangled and pushed him away, fumbling for her nightgown and a blanket to go to the door.

“Come quick!” Markos, his face flushed in the lantern light. “Oh come quick, please come, we’ve found him—”

She hadn’t even known a man was missing. No one had told her, or asked her to join the search.

Sofia dressed in a blur, by the light of a lamp her lover must have lit. She found her bag of bandages and salves by rote, and was out the door with Markos. A second man came behind them, the tall stranger. He followed them to a house, where old Stephan was laid out on the floor, moaning like the wind.

Sofia knelt. They brought her light. They kept trying to tell her what had happened. She shut out the sounds and only looked and felt. It was the leg, the left leg. Around the knee was horribly swollen. Broken? Stephan shouted when she tried to move it.

Sofia closed her eyes. Behind them she saw, clear and black and white, the diagram in Campione’s books. The knee, and the threads that connected the joints under the muscles. And then she knew.

When it was finished, the last bandage neatly tied,and Stephan nearly drowned in wine and snoring happily, dawn was breaking. By the gray light she saw Campione accepting a cup of hot tea. But he didn’t drink it; he gave it to her. The whole house watched while she drank it, and then the women kissed her and rubbed her hands with cloths dipped in lemon water.

“Who’s this, then?” Old Marya nodded at the tall stranger.

“My servant,” Sofia said quickly, before she could think. “He helps me with my goats. And carries my things. He came to me in the rains, looking for work.” Was she talking too much? “He sleeps in the goatshed. I let him sleep there.”

“Is he mute?”

“Sometimes,” Campione answered.

Marya laughed, displaying all that was left of her teeth. “You should mend the healer’s roof. Just stand on a goat; you’re tall enough you don’t even need a ladder!”

Campione smiled thinly and ducked his head. Sofia could tell he’d barely understood one word.

The language was a mask that he put on, like those masks they had for the crazy torchlit parties on the streets of his old city, hiding his true face. Weirdly, masks transformed not only faces. When they tied theirs on, his graceful friends became tottering old men or prancing beasts, mincing maidens or loping fools. The mask went deep.

Not deep enough. He wanted true transformation: to lose the memory of torches, friends and streets—to forget there ever was a mask at all. To become the thing he mimed. To lose what he had been.

“When I was a girl, after my father died, I found a bird dead in the wood. I opened it with my knife, then and there, to see what was inside.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve never told anyone this.”

“Tell me.”

She did know other stories. The one about the girl whose lover came to her every night, strong and lovely in the dark. Her sisters scared her into burning him with light—and then began the girl’s sorrows, and her wanderings.

The girl in that story was a young thing, though, with friends and family she thought that she could trust. Sofia was a woman, and kept her own counsel.

The villagers asked him: How are you? and he said: Well. They asked him, Where is your lady? and he said: Garden.

They asked him, Where do you come from? and he said: I don’t understand.

“ Where do you come from?”

It trembled on her tongue a hundred times a day, but she never let it take shape in the air between them, even in the dark when her tongue was velvet night on the star-spangled sky of his skin. Instead she said, “I am happy. I am so happy with you. I never thought I could be happy like this.”

He didn’t really have the words to argue, and finally he stopped trying.

On the other side of the world, on the other side of sleep, was a city he had loved with his whole heart. There came a time when his shadow began to stretch across it more and more, taking up too much room, until it wasn’t his city anymore. His city was one where he and his lover lurked, notorious and indecipherable.