Forever Shores (2 page)

Introduction
by Peter McNamara

I've only a couple of personal notes to add.

Both notes concern my belief that genre writing and publishing in this country doesn't work hard enough at building or reinforcing its own mythology.

Something for me to note
positively
was the pleasure I received when I found that the assembly of this anthology was coincident with Terry Dowling's return to the
Rynosseros
cycle. An even greater pleasure was to recently receive from Terry a package of these stories to read: the three short pieces, ‘Coyote Struck By Lightning', ‘Coming Down' and ‘Sewing Whole Cloth', that assemble to form ‘Rynemonn'. Tom Tyson is the nearest we have to an icon of Oz genre writing (whatever became of Chandler's Grimes?)—we all want to see him complete his personal journey, but none of us want to lose him. Like the red desert he inhabits, he's part of us.

But as one icon shifts ground, a replacement emerges—so that another coincident pleasure was the arrival—only in short story form at this stage—of Alexander James's urban sorcerer, Barker Moon (though I believe ‘A Spell at the End of the World' features one of Barker's ancestors).

At once, I was both struck by lightning and under a spell. Why not, I asked myself, centre the anthology around this rare crossover of characters and worlds? Why not take the opportunity to offer this resonant Tom story to all those who have waited so long for it (sorry, Terry, but you've hardly been rushing it), and push young Alexander (another unhurried writer) along by thrusting his alter ego out into the public glare?

I feel as if I'm right in the middle of one of those very rare moments in genre history. There's electricity involved. I want to hold the moment, but, of course, everything is transitory, and I know I can't.

But other anthologists can come back to it. Though the Blue Captain's destiny now presents itself, Tom has far from run his course (this moment will need to be revisited)—while Barker is just striding onto the stage. We haven't got a feel for him yet.

To personal note number two, an accounting for my tastes.

The line between science fiction and fantasy is often blurred beyond distinction. Stories readily slide across the boundary, and are defined only by the reader's personal tastes and intuition, and perhaps, if one can pick it, the author's intent.

The Aurealis Awards, which splits into divisions of science fiction, fantasy, horror, young adult and children's genre literature, regularly points up this difficulty in categorisation. Recently, Terry Dowling's ‘The Lagan Fishers', Jack Dann's ‘The Diamond Pit' and Lucy Sussex's ‘Merlusine' turned up in short-lists on both sides of the fantasy/science fiction dividing line. My instincts and reading of intent told me they were
all
fantasy stories, but in a couple of cases, even the authors disagreed with me. It seems they had intended quite the opposite.

One author pressed on me the fact that their tale was set some considerable period into the future, and that automatically made it science fiction. I disagreed. Setting, for me, has little or nothing to do with it. Tone and architecture are the defining characteristics.

Which brings me to something a bit more detailed about my view of why we chose these stories. Storyline is probably the first thing
I
try to pick up on—and that doesn't necessarily mean a steady progression from beginning to middle to end (not that there's anything wrong with that!) but some ‘journey' has to be involved. And the storyline has to rise out of the plot. That's fundamental.

There's not much room in a short story to develop character, but I still like to get a
feel
for the characters—more than height and hair or eye colour. Style, tone and voice are all aspects that lift a story (and are vital in sketching the characters), but what I look for most eagerly is good architecture—at its most basic, the way form complements content. As I see it, the storyline is the ‘telling' of the tale, but the architecture is its true ‘expression'.

Short stories are a contained force, and many writers find them more difficult to execute than the less urgent, often-rambling novel form, but, when well constructed, they take on an elegance to which novels simply can't aspire. We should all be reading more anthologies.

While I'm confident that everything in this anthology is classifiable as fantasy, some stories would look equally at home in other categories. ‘Rynemonn', ‘Players', ‘Glimmer', ‘Heaven', ‘Waste' and ‘A Room for …' would not be out of place in a science fiction collection, while ‘Spell' and the gruesome ‘Charlottes' could find a home in anything with the word ‘dark' addressing it. The leanings of the others split between pure fantasy and mainstream.

Though everything is really mainstream, isn't it? We just like to think we're different.

The Phoenix
Isobelle Carmody

‘Princess Ragnar?'

Ragnar turned to William and tried to smile, but her hatred was so great that it would allow no other emotion. She did not feel it as heat but as a bitter burning cold flowing through her, freezing her to ice, to stone. Driven by such a rage, a princess might unleash her armies and destroy an entire city to the last person. She might command the end of a world.

‘Princess? Are you cold?'

She barely heard William's words, but when she shook her head, before he turned away to keep watch for Torvald, she saw in his pale-green eyes the same blaze of devotion that had flared three summers past when he had pledged himself to her.

Her mind threw up an image of him making that pledge, the words as formal as the words from an old Bible.

‘Princess, I, William, am sent by the Gods to serve and guard you in this strange shadowland, until we are shown the way home by such signs and portents as I am trained to recognise. I pledge my life to you.'

Twelve years old, with one slightly turned eye, a broken front tooth, ripped shorts and a too large cast-off T-shirt advising the world to ‘Be happy', and here he was pledging his life to her.

He had a collection of T-shirts abandoned by the drug addicts and drunks who came to stay at Goodhaven to dry out. The weird thing was that those T-shirts always seemed to have something pertinent to say about what was happening when he wore them, and in the end, she came to see them as signs, just as William saw as signs a certain bird flying overhead, or a particular rock resting against another.

Hearing his absurd pledge, she had experienced a fleeting instinct to laugh out of nervousness or incredulity. That would have changed everything. Life could be like that sometimes—hinging on one tiny little thing or other. But she hadn't laughed because underneath the urchin dirt and crazy talk, she had seen a reflection of her own aching loneliness.

‘Are you sure you have the right person?' she had said, instead of, ‘Are you crazy?' But it was close. They even started with the same words.

‘You are Princess Ragnar,' he had said.

Those words sent a shiver up her spine, even after so much time. Because she had never seen him before. Then there was how he said her name—as if he was handling something infinitely precious. No one had said it like that before in her whole life except maybe her mother, though perhaps that was just a memory born of wishful thinking.

‘How do you know my name?' she had demanded.

He had grinned, flashing the chipped tooth that she later learned had been broken when he'd happened on a drying-out drunk who had managed to drink a whole cupboard-full of cough medicine. The Goodhaven people stocked up on everything because they thought the world was going to end any day now and they wanted to be prepared. Though how a hundred tins of baked beans and a cupboard-full of cough medicine was supposed to help you survive the end of the world was beyond Ragnar. The drunk's back-handed slap had left William with the chip in his tooth that his aunt called God's will. In fact, that was what William had told her when she'd asked what had happened to his front tooth.

‘It was God's will.' As if God had slapped him one.

The chip was wide enough to make him talk with a lisp, but since he could still use his teeth, fixing it would have been cosmetic and his aunt and uncle eschewed worldly vanity, believing it to be one of the things that brought most of the human debris they called Poor Lost Souls to Goodhaven in the first place.

Besides that, William was simple and it would hardly matter to the poor addled child that he had a chipped tooth when his brain was all but cracked clear through.

Those words came to her in William's mimicked version of his aunt's high-pitched folksy voice. That was how she explained him away to occasional government visitors and fund-raising groups concerned about a child being exposed to the sort of people who came to Goodhaven.

‘Oh, he has seen much worse than anything he could ever see here,' William had mimicked his aunt. ‘Why, his brain cracked under the pressure of seeing his mother and father murdered before his very eyes. He was there all alone a good two years before someone found him wandering around mad as a hatter.'

William had been looked after by the same people who had murdered his parents, though no one could figure out why they would bother. Maybe it was because he was so young. He was four when his relatives had agreed to take him on.

He was no simpleton. Ragnar had seen that right off, but he was sure as heck one strange piece of toast, and no wonder. Seeing your parents murdered would be enough to make anyone a little crazy.

Of course, she had known nothing at all about that the first time they'd met.

She had been swimming and had come out of the water wearing nothing but her long red hair. There was never anyone around during the week and she had been pretending to be the mermaid; trying to make up her mind whether the love of a prince would be worth the loss of her voice and the feeling that she was standing on knives every time she took a step. Especially when her father said love did not last, or else why had her mother run off and left them?

She was trying to figure out where she had left her clothes when William walked out carrying them. He had his eyes on her face and he did not once let them drop. He just held out her clothes and she snatched them up and pulled on jeans and a sloppy paint-stained windcheater, her face flaming.

Then he had suddenly fallen to his knees.

Her embarrassment evaporated since she was clothed now and anyway the boy clearly had no prurient interest in her nakedness.

She put her hands on her hips. ‘Who the heck are you?'

‘The gods have seen that you are lonely, Ragnar, and so I was sent to be your companion.'

Anything she would have said was obliterated by astonishment. For she was lonely beyond imagining. Her father had forbidden her to let anyone at her school know they were living illegally in the boathouse, which made it easier to have no friends than to make up believable lies. They had been squatting since the owner had moved to America, having told her father he could use the boathouse for his dinghy if he kept an eye on it. Her father took the dinghy out maybe three times a year and she was always convinced he would drown because he never took any of the things you were supposed to take like flares or lifejackets. He didn't have to fish since his Sickness Benefit paid for food and cask wine. He worried her sick when he went out, and she could never understand why he did it. It wasn't even as if he ever caught anything big enough to be legal or good eating.

Once, while they were keeping vigil for his return, William told Ragnar matter-of-factly that her father fished because he remembered when he had been a real fisherman.

‘He was never a real fisherman,' Ragnar snorted. ‘He was some sort of mechanic.'

‘In his past life he was a fisherman and he slept with one of the goddesses. She took you away with her, but because you were part human, the gods made her send you here. As a punishment to her because she broke the rules.'

‘Seems to me the gods and goddesses do nothing but break rules. Look at Prometheus and Pandora.'

‘They are lesser gods,' William had said with a lofty kind of pride. ‘My princess comes from an older and greater race of gods. And if he was not a fisherman once, then why does your father fish?'

As usual his habit of suddenly circling and darting back on an argument left her gasping like a fish out of water. The thing was she did not know why her father had brought them here to this spit of flat sand between an industrial wasteland and a whole lot of salt pans and wetlands. Nor why he fished.

Ragnar had known no other life. Not really. She sometimes remembered a mother who did not seem to have much to do with the mother her father muttered and cursed about. William had an answer for that as well. He thought that she was remembering not her mother in this life, but the goddess mother of her other life.

‘Then how come my father remembers me being born?'

‘The gods can make anyone remember or forget. They made your father remember his wife having a child—and maybe she did have a baby.' His eyes flashed as he warmed to this theme. ‘Maybe she took their real child with her and the gods just stepped in and put you here, so he would think she left his baby. So he would take care of you and keep you out of the eye of the world.'

William was as worried about the eye of the world as her father. William, because of his uncle and aunt's fear of negative publicity that might affect Goodhaven's funding sources, and her father because he did not want to be thrown out of the boathouse, or have Social Security people poking around. Sending her to school worried him because if he didn't They would be after him—They being the Government—but if he did, people would find out where they were living. He had solved the problem by sending her to school, but telling her that if anyone figured out where she lived, she would be taken away to an orphanage and locked up. That had frightened her so much she said so little at school that people thought there was something wrong with her. Fortunately integration policies, and her own consistently normal marks, kept them from trying to send Ragnar to a special school of the sort William told such horror stories about. His relatives had tried a whole lot of schools before he had managed to convince them he was too far gone for school.

‘I like people thinking I'm crazy. It's easier and I know what I am inside so what they think doesn't matter.'

Of course as she grew older, Ragnar's fear of the authorities was diluted to wary caution, but her father sealed her silence. He said they would never allow her to take Greedy away with them.

Greedy was a crippled seagull William had rescued and given to her as a gift, saying that in the realm of the gods, the seagull was her personal hawk. It was so devoted, William told her solemnly, that it had followed her to this world, but in order to come to her the gods offered the proud hawk only the form of a lowly scavenger. He told her the hawk's real name was Thorn, but secretly she nicknamed it Greedy, because it was.

‘Thorn is hungry because in his previous life he was starved by the gods to try to make him forswear his allegiance to you,' William had told her reproachfully the one time he heard her calling the bird Greedy.

William had an answer for everything. Truth was, he was a lot smarter than most of the kids and the teachers at school, at least in ways that mattered. He did not read, but he could tell stories better than any book, and he had built around the two of them a fantasy that was far more wonderful than life could ever offer. In the years since they had first met, he had been her companion and everything else she had wanted—slave, brother, confidant, friend. He had shed blood to seal his pledge though she had not wanted or asked for it, and he had promised to serve and obey, honour and protect her—with his own life if necessary.

He had watched her for a long time to make sure she was truly the one, he told her earnestly one time as they were baking mussels in a battered tin pot of salty water on a small fire. The water had to be salty or the crustaceans tasted vile.

‘But how did you know in the end?'

He shrugged. ‘I found a sign and I knew—a ring of dead jellyfish on the beach in the shape of a crown.'

It was easier to obey William's odd instructions than to try to understand why he thought a toilet brush in seaweed was a warning that you were being discussed, or how walking a certain way round an overturned shell could avert an accident. It was very rare that he wanted her to do anything troublesome, though once when he said they must walk along the railway lines for so many paces, she worried a lot because, if they were caught, they would end up in the children's court. But they had done it and William claimed that was what had stopped a council van coming down to Cheetham Point to check out rumours of people living there.

Did he manipulate events as he claimed? Mostly, Ragnar figured not, but it never hurt to take out insurance. Because there were many times when William knew things he could not know. Sometimes she would be going to catch the train and he would tell her that she would miss it, so he would wait for her in their secret place. And the train mysteriously would not come. Other times he would tell her it was going to rain when she was dressed lightly and, sure enough, by the end of the day, it would be pelting down.

Coincidence? Maybe. Ragnar did not believe she was a princess in exile. Not really. Though she did feel as if she had been born for more than this bit of barren land. One part of her looked at her father when he was drunk with his mouth open, a thin ribbon of drool falling from his lips, and knew she had been born of nobler blood. Sometimes when she was sitting in class, knowing the answers, but never speaking out because being too smart could bring you into the Public Eye even more than being too dumb, a little voice would whisper to her that she was special and destined for greatness, just as William said.

Sometimes when she and William sat at the very end of the land watching the sun fall in a haze of gold into the ocean, he would ask her if she felt the magic, and she would nod, lifting her chin and holding back her shoulders as regally as a princess, proud even in exile. Greedy would shiver on her lap, as if for a moment remembering his life as a mighty hawk hunter, bane of mice and small birds and even of cats.

It had been through such a sunset of molten gold that Torvald came to them. The day was uncommonly still and a sea-mist was shot with bloody gold and red lights as the sun fell. Ragnar saw something shimmer and all at once could see a young man with golden hair flying in the wind, and a proud handsome face, coming on his boat out of the mist, and her lips had parted in breathless wonder. Then she heard the whining stutter of the speedboat engine and realised he was coming across the water to Cheetham Point from the Ridhurst Grammar School jetty.