Dreams of Distant Shores Read online

  Pre-publication praise for Dreams of Distant Shores

  “I love Patricia McKillips’s novels, but even more, I am passionate about her brilliant short stories—those coruscating jewels that are both remarkable for their language, their power, their wit, and their depth. She writes pure fantasy and historical fantasy with equal ease. More, more please.”

  —Jane Yolen, author of Briar Rose, Sister Emily’s Lightship, The Devil’s Arithmetic, and Sister Light, Sister Dark

  [*] “McKillip (Wonders of the Invisible World), winner of the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, collects nine dazzling shorter pieces (both originals and reprints) in this outstanding collection. The brief, creepy “Weird” opens the volume, merging an oddly romantic picnic in a bathroom and a mysterious threat outside into something that exists in a darkly beautiful interstitial place. The longest piece, “Something Rich and Strange,” which appeared originally as a standalone novella in Brian Froud’s Faerielands series, is an ecological fairy tale that contains the most gorgeous of McKillip’s prose (“her blind stare of pearl and wormwood”)—and the weakest of her plots, but even weaker McKillip is well worth reading. The newer stories also shine. “Mer” is a small gem about a nameless witch, a fishing village, and a mermaid statue. “Edith and Henry Go Motoring” features a toll bridge that leads travelers on an unexpected journey. Beyond the short fiction, the volume finishes with an essay on writing high fantasy, and an appreciation of McKillip’s work by renowned fantasist Peter S. Beagle. Fans of exquisite prose and ethereal fantasy will need to own this.”

  —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “Some authors we read for their characters and their plots, others for the beauty of their language. I read Pat McKillip for all three. She’s gifted beyond compare, a national treasure who should be cherished by all lovers of literature, and Dreams of Distant Shores is a perfect example of why I hold her in such high esteem.”

  —Charles de Lint, author of The Onion Girl and The Riddle of the Wren

  “Ever since finding and loving The Riddle-Master of Hed many years ago, I have read everything Patricia McKillip has written. You should too. Start with this book!”

  —Garth Nix, author of Sabriel and the Keys to the Kingdom series

  “Anyone about to open this book is a very lucky person indeed. You are about to encounter mysteries, monsters, jewels, songs, witches, a treasure chest of story. Here are magic worlds, places of enchantment, and a wonderful, lyrical voice to guide you through them.”

  —Lisa Goldstein, author of The Red Magician and The Uncertain Places

  Praise for the Patricia A. McKillip story collection

  Wonders of the Invisible World

  “McKillip’s is the first name that comes to mind when I’m asked whom I read myself.”

  —Peter S. Beagle, author, The Last Unicorn, The Line Between, and Sleight of Hand

  “There are no better writers than Patricia A. McKillip.”

  —Stephen R. Donaldson, author The Chronicles of Thomas Convenant

  “Endlessly astonishing and impressive fantasist McKillip (The Bards of Bone Plain) travels the shadowy twilight realm between worlds and returns with the raw stuff of dreams.”

  —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “Mesmerizing. . . . Any collection of McKillip’s short stories will be a valuable asset to any library and a joy to her many fans.”

  —Library Journal, starred review

  “Anybody who loves fantasy—not just for what most fantasy does, but for what the genre is really capable of—should definitely pick this book up. It’s like a perfect encapsulation of fantasy writing at its most brave and beautiful.”

  —io9.com

  “A casket full of wonders. I think each one is my favorite, until I read the next. McKillip has the true Mythopoeic imagination. Here lies the border between our world and that of Faerie.”

  —P. C. Hodgell, author of the Kencyrath series

  “This brilliant new collection puts on display the audacity, the warmth, the intelligence, and depth of [McKillip’s] huge and magnificent talent.”

  —Peter Straub, author of Ghost Story and A Dark Matter

  “The lively and enchanting stories in Wonders of the Invisible World certainly deserve all the accolades I can summon.”

  —Paul Goat Allen, Barnes and Noble.com

  “I loved all the stories in this collection, and if I still have to tell you to try this out, well, you haven’t been reading my review. . . . Patricia McKillip is a master at what she does. Strongly recommended.”

  —Locus

  “Wonders of the Invisible World is a wonderful collection of stories full of wit and insight wrapped in beautiful, effortless prose. McKillip’s ability to convey so much in so few words is impressive, as is her ability with storytelling, characterization, and thematic elements.”

  —Fantasy Cafe

  Praise for Patricia A. McKillip

  “There are no better writers than Patricia A. McKillip.”

  —Stephen R. Donaldson, author of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant

  “Intricate, beautiful. . . .”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “A master storyteller.”

  —Strange Horizons

  “Nothing less than masterly.”

  —Booklist

  “Lush imagery and wry humor. . . . McKillip’s rich language conveys real strangeness and power.”

  —Starlog

  “World Fantasy Award–winner McKillip can take the most common fantasy elements—dragons and bards, sorcerers and shape-shifters—and reshape them in surprising and resonant ways.”

  —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “McKillip skillfully knits disparate threads into a rewardingly rich and satisfying story.”

  —Amazon

  Books by Patricia A. McKillip

  The Riddle-Master trilogy

  The Riddle-Master of Hed (1976)

  Heir of Sea and Fire (1977)

  Harpist in the Wind (1979)

  Kyreol duology

  Moon-Flash (1984)

  The Moon and the Face (1985)

  The Cygnet duology

  The Sorceress and the Cygnet (1991)

  The Cygnet and the Firebird (1993)

  Other Works

  The House on Parchment Street (1973)

  The Throne of the Erill of Sherril (1973)

  The Forgotten Beasts of Eld (1974)

  The Night Gift (1976)

  Stepping from the Shadows (1982)

  Fool’s Run (1987)

  The Changeling Sea (1988)

  Something Rich and Strange (A Tale of Brian Froud's Faerielands) (1994)

  The Book of Atrix Wolfe (1995)

  Winter Rose (1996)

  Song of the Basilisk (1998)

  The Tower at Stony Wood (2000)

  Ombria in Shadow (2002)

  In the Forests of Serre (2003)

  Alphabet of Thorn (2004)

  Od Magic (2005)

  Harrowing the Dragon (2005)

  Soltice Wood (2006)

  The Bell at Sealey Head (2008)

  The Bards of Bone Plain (2010)

  Wonders of the Invisible World (2012)

  Dreams of Distant Shores

  PATRICIA A. McKILLIP

  Tachyon | | San Francisco

  Dreams of Distant Shores

  Copyright © 2016 by Patricia A. McKillip

  This is a collected work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form without the express permission of the publishe
r.

  Dear Pat: Afterword by Peter S. Beagle copyright © 2015 by Peter S. Beagle

  Interior and cover design by Elizabeth Story

  Cover art “By the Window” copyright © 2007 by Thomas Canty

  Tachyon Publications

  1459 18th Street #139

  San Francisco, CA 94107

  415-285-5615

  [email protected]

  www.tachyonpublications.com

  smart sicence fiction & fantasy

  Series Editor: Jacob Weisman

  Project Editor: Jill Roberts

  ISBNS: EPUB 978-1-61696-219-7 | Mobi: 978-1-61696-220-3 | PDF: 978-1-61696-221-0

  Printed in the United States by Worzalla

  First Edition: 2016

  All stories copyright © by Patricia A. McKillip

  “Weird” copyright © 2013 by Patricia A. McKillip. First appeared in Unconventional Fantasy, edited by Peggy Rae Sapienza, Jean Marie Ward, Bill Campbell, and Sam Lubell (Baltimore Washington WorldCon Association, Inc.: Baltimore). | “Mer” copyright © 2016 by Patricia A. McKillip. Original to this collection. | “The Gorgon in the Cupboard” copyright © 2004 by Patricia A. McKillip. First appeared in To Weave a Web of Magic, edited by Susan Allison (Berkley Books: New York). | “Which Witch” copyright © 2012 by Patricia A. McKillip. First appeared in Under My Hat, edited by Jonathan Strahan (Bluefire: New York). | “Edith and Henry Go Motoring” copyright © 2016 by Patricia A. McKillip. Original to this collection. | “Alien” copyright © 2016 by Patricia A. McKillip. Original to this collection. | “Something Rich and Strange” copyright © 1994 by Patricia A. McKillip. First appeared as Something Rich and Strange (Bantam: New York). | “Writing High Fantasy” copyright © 2002 by Patricia A. McKillip. First appeared in The Writer’s Guide to Fantasy Literature, edited by Philip Martin (Kalmbach Publishing Company: Waukesha, Wisconsin).

  For Dave, for so many reasons

  With thanks to Susan Allison, Jonathan Strahan, and Terri Windling for inspiring, respectively, the Gorgon, the Crow, and the Sea Hare. . . . And very special thanks to Jacob Weisman for keeping track of my work and putting it in order.

  Table of Contents

  Weird

  Mer

  The Gorgon in the Cupboard

  Which Witch

  Edith and Henry Go Motoring

  Alien

  Something Rich and Strange

  Writing High Fantasy

  Dear Pat: Afterword by Peter S. Beagle

  Weird

  “What's the weirdest thing that ever happened to you?” he asked.

  “Weird,” she repeated. “You mean like weird funny? Weird spooky?”

  “Just weird.” He brushed the crook of her elbow, the little hollow there, with one finger, lightly. “As in: for which there is no other word.”

  She thought. “You mean like the time I got swept up into an alien spaceship and examined by doctors who looked like talking iguanas wearing surgery gowns?”

  He shook his head. “No. That’s just silly. True weird.”

  “Well.” She paused, lips parted, eyes dazzled by light, feeling his warm lips burrow into the hollow, leave a kiss that lingered there, an echo, a memory. “That would have to be what happened at my cousin Delaney’s wedding when the shoe landed in the wedding cake.”

  He lay back, one hand under his head, the other touching, just barely with the tips of his fingers, the underside of her wrist. “Did it happen to you?”

  “Not really. Except it being my shoe that landed in the cake. But it wasn’t personal.”

  “That doesn’t count.”

  She thought again. They were lying on every bath towel they could find. The bathroom floor was white and green tile, hard and cold but generously wide. They had piled hand towels under their heads, and used the bath sheets for blankets. The pretty gold wire wastebasket was filled with fruit, both fresh and dried, some Italian salami, packets of water crackers and digestive biscuits, a little jar of Kalamata olives, another of gourmet mustard, individually wrapped wedges of mushroom Brie, a bar of hazelnut chocolate, and a small vacuum pack of smoked, peppered salmon, along with the considerable length of purple ribbon that had been wrapped around the gift tray. The tray itself, a very nice bamboo hors d’oeuvres board, had gone out the window just before she slammed it shut and locked it.

  They had water; they had plumbing; they were a little short on utensils, but, as he pointed out, they could use toothbrush handles, and the little files that slid in and out of nail clippers.

  She remembered something suddenly. “Oh. My grandfather Pippin’s funeral.”

  “Pippin?”

  “Yeah. Like the apple. He was ninety-two. He wore leather bedroom slippers for twenty years because he kept his money in his shoes.”

  “Again,” he said patiently, “is this about you?”

  “No,” she said. “But it is weird. The slippers seemed to have melted into his feet. In later years, they guessed, he showered in them. I won’t even mention what state his toenails were in. They were sort of woven together—”

  “You’re making this up!”

  She gave a little, liquid chuckle, like a pipe’s gurgle. “Just the toenail part. Sorry. I got carried away. But the weird thing was, after they got him safely underground and came back to his house to clean it out, they found those slippers, a little worse for the wear, you know, bits of dirt and grass on them, right beside his bed, as if they had walked there after the funeral.”

  “You are so inventing this,” he groaned. “And it’s not even very good. Concentrate. The weirdest thing that happened to you. Not your cousin or heaven help us your demented grandfather or your pet tortoise—” The howling started; he had to raise his voice a little, close as they were, to be heard over it. “You do know what weird means.”

  “Fate.”

  “What?”

  She turned her head, shouted into his ear. “Fate. It’s one of the earliest meanings. I learned that when—” The menacing, furious, strangely desperate racket ceased as abruptly as it had begun; her own yelling softened into laughter. “Sorry. Anyway. Speaking of which—”

  “Of what?”

  “Macbeth. The three weird sisters. I did meet a witch once—a real one.”

  He sat up indignantly, sending hand towels rolling. Leaning on one arm, looking down at her, he demanded, “Are you making this up, too?”

  “No. This is true.” She paused, admiring the honey-amber glow of his skin; she held the back of her wrist against his breast, her ivory on his rich warmth. “Come back down. I’ll tell you. And, yes, it happened to me.”

  She waited while he piled the hand towels again for his head, sank back down beside her. Then they both had to wait during the thundering clatter, like some gigantic backhoe scooping up a hundred old-fashioned metal garbage cans into its vast maw and dropping them from a great height onto a street jammed with empty cars, trucks, buses. She could feel the floor vibrate slightly under the appalling din. Her own voice sounded small, diminished, in the silence that followed.

  “Her name was Jehane. She had long, wild, curly red hair and the most lovely, wicked smile, even though she had lost one eyetooth, maybe during an initiation ceremony or something.” She felt him shift, but he didn’t question the tale, not yet. “She told me she lived in an RV with a cat, a raven, and a snake, all with bizarre names. I mean, who would name a cat Tisiphone?”

  “You,” he said. “Where are you in this?”

  “I met her in a bar where my crazy boyfriend at the time played bass in a band. Concert bass, not electric. She was drinking a mojito and writing a spell on a napkin when I came up and accidently knocked her glass over onto the napkin. Well, I thought it was an accident. But when I apologized, she said, ‘There are no accidents.’ She had an odd accent. Portuguese, maybe, or something Balkan. Ancient Irish? Anyway, I bought her another drink and she invited me to sit beside her. No. It was more like a command than an invitation. She told me that my boyfriend
played the bass very well, and that he would dump me before the year ended for a singer-songwriter who wore only black.”

  “Did you still pay for her drink?”

  “The witch offered to sell me a spell to keep him from leaving. She smiled her charming smile, which was itself a spell, and we both laughed. I didn’t think about it again until he did leave me, a few weeks later, for a little whey-faced musician with a skinny voice who wrote morose songs on her acoustic guitar. I remembered then that there was no way for the witch to have known the bass player was my boyfriend, when she said what she said. No explicable way, I mean. Except that she was a witch.”

  “Is that as weird as it gets?”

  She shook her head. “Not even close.”

  Someone or something pounded ferociously on the bathroom door. The door rattled and shook; the glass holding the toothbrushes clattered into the sink; her bathrobe fell off the hook on the door. The banging, fierce and energetic, was accompanied by deep, barking shouts in an unfamiliar language. Their hands shifted under the towels, seeking each other; their eyes locked. One final, exasperated pound was accompanied by a more familiar word, “Shit!” They waited; the silence held.

  He said finally, “Go on.”

  She drew a breath. “Well. The real weirdness started that first night. The bartender mopped up the puddle I made and threw the mojito-soaked spell away. I was about to stop him, but the witch said before I could speak, ‘Don’t bother. The spell hasn’t gone anywhere.’ Like she read my mind.”

  “Then why was she writing it down?”

  “I asked her that. Someone at the bar had requested it, then left after paying for it and hadn’t returned. I asked her what the spell had been for. She only told me, ‘Spells are alive. Spoken about, they find carriers and travel like rumor until they reach the one who craves that particular spell and will pay for it. The spell will be turned into words, and therein lies its terrible and wonderful power.’ Really. That’s what she said. ‘Therein.’ Then the band took a break and my boyfriend came to the bar. I introduced them.”