Avram Davidson - The Avram Davidson Treasury - a tribute collection

“Yes.”

Old Stevan nodded benignly. “That’s it, then, is it? The love charm?”

Gavrillo hesitated, then scowled again.

“Which one means more to you? Or, putting it another way, at which are you more proficient? Take the charm for the other.”

The young man threw out his hands. “I am good at neither! And it is important to me that I must excel in one of them.”

Stevan lit another cigarette. “Why only one? Take both. The price—”

But Gavrillo shook his head. “It’s not the price.” He looked out on the wide-spread scene, the deep and dark-green valleys with their forest of oak and beech and pine, the mountains blue with distance, the silvery river. “It’s not the price,” he repeated.

“As far as you can see on all sides,” the old man said quietly; “in fact, farther, my reputation is known. People have come to me from across the frontier. If it is not the price, take both.” He saw Gavrillo shake his head, but continued to speak. “The hunt. A day like today. You take your gun and go off in the woods with a few friends. The road is dusty, but in the woods, in the shade, it is cool. Your friends want to go to the right, but you, you have the charm, you know that the way to turn is to the left. They may protest, but you are so confident that they follow. Presently you see something out of the corner of your eye. The others have not noticed it at all, or perhaps assume it is the branch of a dead tree. But you know better. Your eye is clear, you turn swiftly, your arm and hand are quick as never before, the bird flushes, you fire! There it is, at your feet — a fine woodcock. Eh?”

Gavrillo nodded, eyes gleaming.

“Or it might be a red doe, or a roebuck. A fine stag! You can hardly count all the points! Everyone admires you… Perhaps in the winter the peasants come to you. ‘Master, a wolf. No one is such a hunter as you are. Come, save our flocks.’ They have not even seen the beast when your shot brings it down. You wait while they fetch it. They drag the creature along, shouting your praise: ‘Only one shot, and at that distance, too!’ they cry, and kiss your hand. ‘Brave one, hero,’ they call you.

A dreamy smile played on Gavrillo’s face, and he slowly, slowly nodded.

Old Stevan waited a few moments; but when his visitor said no word, he went on. “Then there is love. What can compare to that? A man who does not enjoy the love of women is only half alive — if even so much. No doubt there is a young woman on whom you have looked, often, with longing, but who never returns that look. She has long black hair. How it glistens, how it gleams! Her lips are soft and red, and sometimes she wets them with her red little tongue. Inside her bodice the young breasts grow, ripe and sweet as fruit …”

The young man’s eyes seemed glazed. He did not stop the slow nodding of his head.

“You return, the love charm is in your pocket, against your heart, here . There is a dance, you join in, so does she. Presently you come face to face. She looks at you — as if she has never seen you before. How wide her eyes grow! Her mouth opens. Her teeth are small and white. You smile at her and instantly she smiles back, then looks away, shyly — but only for an instant — and you dance together.

“Soon the stars come out and the moon rises. The old women are drowsing, the old men are drunk. You take her hand in yours and the two of you slip away. The moment you stop, she throws her arms around you and puts her mouth up to be kissed. The night is warm, the grass is soft. The night is dark and deep, and love is sweet.”

Gavrillo made a sound between a sigh and a groan. Slowly he reached into his pocket, took out his purse, and began to slide its contents into his hand.

“You have made up your mind?” the old man asked. “Which is it to be, then?” There was no answer. Something caught the old man’s eye. “This one is a foreign coin,” he said, touching it with his finger. “But never mind, I will take it: it is gold.”

Gavrillo’s eyes fell to his hand. He picked up the coin, and an odd look came at once over his face. The dreamy, undecided expression vanished immediately. His eyelids became slits, his lips turned down in an ugly fashion, something like a sneer.

After a moment the old man said, “You have made up your mind?”

“Yes,” Gavrillo said. “I have made up my mind.” …

There was only an old woman before him at the ticket window. He had crossed the river just a few minutes before. The contents of his small suitcase had not engaged the attention of the customs officials for long; and from there it was only a short walk to the railroad station.

The old woman went away, and Gavrillo stepped up to the window. On the wall of the tiny office, facing him, were two framed photographs, side by side. The likeness of the older man was the same one that had been on the coin which had caught Old Stevan’s attention; but Gavrillo knew the younger man’s face, too — knew it very well, indeed. Once again the odd, ugly, strangely determined expression crossed his face.

The station agent looked up. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Where to?”

“One ticket, one way.” Gavrillo kept looking at the faces in the photographs.

“Very well, sir, a one-way ticket — but where to? Trieste, Vienna?” He was a self-important little man, and his tone grew a trifle sarcastic. “Paris? Berlin? St. Petersburg?”

Slowly Gavrillo’s eyes left the picture. He did not seem to have noticed the sarcasm.

“No,” he said. “Just to Sarajevo.”

I discovered Avram Davidson the summer I invented masturbation.

(That’s right: I invented masturbation. It was 1963; I must ask you to take my word that absolutely the only hints offered to even inquisitive Catholic teenagers in that era were that a behavior called “touching oneself impurely” existed and that those who practiced it were both depraved and doomed. Armed solely with these clues, I intuited the region of the body that must be involved, constructed experiments, and in due time invented the wheel. What matter if I was not the first? Elisha Gray’s invention of the telephone is no less admirable merely because A. G. Bell beat him to the Patent Office by twenty-four hours. I was quite proud of my invention, and all my memories of the summer of 1963 are [vividly] colored by it.)

A week later, in fact, when I brought home the Ace paperback edition of The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction: 14th Series and read its first story—“Sacheverell”—I was feeling so (I won’t even pretend to apologize for this one) cocky that for a glorious moment or two I actually believed I had invented Avram, too. Like the stoned character in John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, gaping at the TV news and saying, “Christ, what an imagination I’ve got!” I had the solipsistic sensation that I had somehow caused Avram to appear in the Universe, out of an artistic necessity. Please, laugh with me at this youthful arrogance of mine, that I thought I bad the power to invent an Avram Davidson. Even God only managed that once.

Fortunately, it was not necessary to invent him, only to discover him. And then to bicycle to the public library, ask why there were no Davidson titles on the shelves, and correct that condition. (I was vaguely aware that there were magazines that published sf, but they weren’t offered for sale anywhere within bike range of my house.)

That particular anthology was truly excellent — I mean, it included Zelazny’s “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” alright? Yet to this day, the story that lingers longest and deepest in my mind from that book is the first one: “Sacheverell.” The second thing I asked the librarian was to order anything she could get with “Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction” in the title, and in time I hunted down all the worthy predecessors of and successors to that volume…but out of all that excellent sf, it’s “Sacheverell” I can still quote large portions of from memory.