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

They’d needed a place where they could be unknown again, the peerless swordsman and the mad aristocrat. A place that didn’t need them, didn’t care how they had held men’s lives in their hand; the swordsman, flawed, turned recluse, the nobleman, overreaching, turned rogue. They needed a place where they could matter only to each other. An island, with a house above the sea.

It had been sweet, so sweet. He thought he’d gotten it right, this time. He thought they could be happy, alone. Hadn’t they both been happy? Hadn’t they?

They brought him up from the sea, no blood no blood. The dead eyes would not look at him.

During the daylight, they were careful not to touch too much. Her cottage was isolated, but not remote. Anyone could come running up at any time—and that is what happened, on a bright, clear afternoon. Sofia was trying to mend a basket with reeds, so that she didn’t have to ask someone in the village to do it for her again, and Campione was indicating they might need to be soaked in water first, when they heard a rustle, and a cry, and it was young Antiope, wailing that her husband had fallen, fallen from a tree nearby, gone high in a tree to pick lemons that she fancied in her condition god help her, while everyone else was picking olives, and now—and now—

His friends brought Illyrian, staggering between them, gasping for air. Sofia got his shirt off, laid him down, felt his ribs. His chest moved in and out as it should—but he was choking. It was something inside him, something she couldn’t feel, something she couldn’t see. Illy’s lips began to turn blue. Unable to breathe he was drowning on dry land.

Campione was beside her, holding something. A book? Couldn’t he see it was too late for drawings and diagrams? He opened it. It was a case, a case full of exquisite knives.

“Please,” Campione said. “Hold.” He didn’t mean the knives; he meant Illyrian. Sofia took the boy’s shoulders. She watched in horror as Campione drove the little knife between the boy’s ribs.

Antiope screamed and screamed. Campione shoved a reed into the wound, and blood gushed out of it. But before anyone could attack the man, Illyrian breathed. A great whoosh of air into his lungs, and the color returned to his face, while the blood poured out the reed.

Campione shrugged. “Please,” he said again; “hold.”

He meant the reed, this time. Sofia took it from him, careful to keep it in place, watching, fascinated, as the young man breathed steadily and the blood drained out of his chest.

Illy’s young wife covered his face in kisses. Their friends stood a respectful distance from Campione, who took his knife to clean.

His hands shook, putting the knives away. He had his back to them all; they couldn’t see. They’d think that he had done all this before.

They moved Illyrian into her house to watch all night, watching his breath for when the blood returned, to unstopper the reed and let it out again. A rib had broken inside, and pierced a vein, it seemed. She fed him wine mixed with poppy, and as the dawn came, Illy’s color deepened, rosy, like the sky, his breath quiet as dawn wind, and the bleeding ended.

Campione sewed up the wound his knife had made. She felt sick, sick with love for him and sick with wanting to know all that he knew.

He’d taken up something new to study, now that he had time. How amusing, here on this island, to be the one who wielded the steel! The little instruments, sharp and precise. You needed sure eyes and a steady hand. He hardly dared to use them, but he read the books and tried. He wasted paper tracing the diagrams, slicing them with a scalpel taken from its velvet case, small and fine as a pen. He modeled chests and legs and stomachs out of wet clay, made his incisions and excisions, grumbling at how hard it was to clean the knives afterwards, while his lover laughed at him:

“ You should have let me teach you the sword, back home, after all. It’s so much easier to clean.”

“For your man,” they said now, when they brought her a chicken, or some cheese, or a bottle of red wine. “Be sure you share it with the man with the knives.”

She did not ask to look at the knives again. He never took them out when she was there. But she knew the knives came out when she was gone. He would show her when he was ready, she thought. She could look at his books, and study them, and wait.

He cried, so, in his sleep.

His lover often went for walks at night; it was not much darker to him than day, and there were fewer people about. He liked to fight the wind.

Night, and the wind. He had not heard him leave the bed, had not felt his weight shift away.

Hadn’t they both been happy? Hadn’t they?

In his sleep, she learned his language from his dreams. She learned the words for No , and Stop . She heard him speak in tones she never heard him use by day, dry and acerbic, like powdered lime without any honey.

His lover was a swordsman, with nothing to fight now but the wind.

His lover could see nothing in the dark, and not much more by day.

Had he seen where the rocks ended and the night sky began?

Had the wind caught him, challenged him, and won?

She did not mean to spy on him. It was a hot day. She had been weeding; he’d been washing clothes. He’d hung them out all over the big bushes of rosemary and thyme to dry sweetly in the sun, and he’d gone inside her thick-walled house to rest, she thought. After a while, she went herself, to get out of the heat.

She opened the door, and stopped.

Her love was sitting at her long table, the case of knives open before him.

She watched him pick up each knife in turn, hold it up to the light, and touch himself lightly with it, as if deciding which one should know him more deeply.

She watched him place the tip of one to his arm, and gently press, and watch the blood run down.

“Campione,” she said from the doorway.

He spoke some words she didn’t understand. He cut himself in yet another place.

“Bad?” she asked.

He answered her again in that other tongue. But at least he laid the knife aside as the words came pouring out of him, thick and fast and liquid.

“I understand,” she said; “I understand.”

“You don’t.” He looked at her. “You cannot.”

“You’re hurt,” she said. He shrugged, and ran his thumb over the shallow cuts he’d made, as if to erase them. “No, hurt inside. You see what is not bearable to see. I know.”

“I see it in my mind,” he muttered. “So clear—so clear—clear and bad, I see.”

She came behind him, now, and touched his arms. “Is there no medicine for your grief?”

He folded his face between her breasts, hearing her living heartbeat.

“Can I cure you, Campione?”

And he said, “No.”

“Can I try?” she asked.

And he said, “Try.”

They brought his lover up from the sea, from the rocks under their window. He hadn’t heard him fall, would never know if he had cried out in surprise, or silently let himself slip from the rocks and into the sea that surrounded them.

The man with the knives married her on midsummer’s day. There were bonfires, and feasting and dancing. He got pretty drunk, and danced with everyone. Everyone seemed happy in her happiness. They jumped over the dying fire, and into their new life together.

And, carefully, he placed the feel of her warm, living flesh over the dread of what he had left, buried, for the earth to touch, on the other side of the island; what he’d left, buried, for the earth to take of what he once had; for the earth to take away the beauty that had been taken away from him by a foot that had slipped, sure as it was always sure, out into the space that would divide them forever.