ASIM_issue_54 (26 page)

He had been sixteen when a travelling shaman had sought him out at the markets. His step-father had already drunk himself into a stupor and the young Chôn was pushing through the crowds alone, trying to sell civet skins and a cage of live birds. He had pulled back from the shaman, instinctively wary, but she smiled at him with a mouth full of black, ruined teeth and said what he had hoped all his life to hear: “I know who you are, boy!” His heart had leapt at those words.

“Do you know who my parents are?”

“No, boy. And they don’t matter. I know who
you
will be.” And she had pressed the scroll into his arms. “When you are old enough to have a reason, this scroll will tell you how to become great.”

Of course, she had taken all his birds and skins in payment, and he had been beaten for losing them, but he had kept the scroll and learnt to read it in secret. And dreamed about beating the Beast on the Mountain.

Until, at last, he had a reason.

* * *

Chôn was woken by the sound of bells.

He sat up quietly and strained to see anything in the darkness. The moon had not yet risen above the trees but moonlight was reflected dimly from the limestone cliffs that loomed up on either side of the glade.

From up in the tree, the bells tinkled again. Rising, Chôn took one of the poles like a spear and hurled it towards the sound. He started banging the flat of his knife against the other pole, shouting loudly. He sensed more than saw the leopard drop from the tree, caught the glint of bared fangs as it snarled at him. Then it turned and melted into the forest.

* * *

Chôn slept until just before dawn. He rose stiff and not much rested. But there was enough light to see that the deer was still up in the tree. He clambered up the tree to drop it down, then lifted it up and draped it over his shoulders. It was much heavier than the rabbits and he was thankful he was not facing the climb all the way up from the river.

It took him almost two hours to regain the beast’s plateau. He squatted down behind a boulder that would hide him if the beast emerged from its cave and started to skin the deer. He tied the skin so it hung from around his neck with the pelt against his back. Then he dragged the carcase out into the open, a little way back from the cleft and the waterfall, and hacked it open so that the entrails spilled out.

Chôn hoped that the bloody heap of flesh and guts would provide a distraction when the beast came after him, to give him time to get into a safe position. But he couldn’t be sure. The baits would be digested by now and the berries might be starting to have an effect.

He backed over towards the cleft and started to yell for the beast, clanging his knife on the rocks. The beast emerged almost at once, skittering on the rocks and turning to face the sound. For a moment, it shifted its weight from foot to foot as if the ground was uncomfortably hot and then, suddenly, it steadied and pulled its great head back and roared. Even a hundred metres away, Chôn shrank back involuntarily. He could see the beast’s flanks shaking with the power of that sound, its lethal tail threshing from side to side.

Then the beast lunged forward, breaking into a run, closing the gap between them much too fast. Chôn scrambled backwards into the cleft, slipping on the wet rocks. The beast was galloping at full stretch; it leapt over the deer without a pause, only focussed on the moving prey in front. Chôn twisted and crawled desperately, trying to get to the back of the cleft in time.

The beast reached the cleft and tried to follow Chôn into it, but it was moving too fast. Its shoulder crashed into the rock, sending stone chips flying. Its rump swung round, its claws thrashing for purchase, and it fell onto its side. It was up again in an instant but the fall had given Chôn the seconds he needed. He reached the back of the cleft and stood pressed against the wet stone. The beast tried to reach him but its shoulders couldn’t get into the narrow cleft. It stood on its hind legs, front legs on either side of the opening and lunged angrily with its neck. Chôn was safely out of reach.

Then the beast twisted away, falling heavily onto its front legs, as if to go. But instead it backed up, pushing its spiked tail into the cleft, scything the long spines to and fro. They clattered on the rocks and the beast roared. Chôn pushed himself harder into the wall as the tail slashed the air half a metre from his face. Suddenly, the beast raised its tail, arching it back over its spine, and Chôn found that he was staring directly at its cloaca.

It clenched and the beast’s guts rumbled. There was an evil hiss and a vile stench suffused the air. Chôn could tell what was coming and squeezed into the hollow beneath the waterfall, holding the deer pelt in front of him, under the water. There was a sudden explosion of flame and a fiery spray of dung splattered on to the wall next to him. It stuck there, burning.

Another spray struck on the other side and then it came in a continuous stream. The beast rocked its back legs, sending the stream of fire from side to side. Some struck the deerskin, sticking to it, hissing as the water hit it. A flaming gob fell on one of Chôn’s feet, poking out past the pelt, and he hurriedly pushed his foot into the water and then pulled it back behind the skin.

The cleft was filling with smoke. Another stream of fire came, not as long as the first. The beast was roaring continuously, but more in pain than rage. The fire stream sputtered and began to alternate with boiling wet shit, splurting with a sound like bubbling porridge, sticking on the rock walls. Then there was one final burst of flame followed by a terrible groan. The beast collapsed heavily onto its belly, utterly spent. The fire and the baits had finally taken their toll. For a moment, the tail hovered, trembling, above the beast’s back before falling to the ground with a clatter of spines. Then all was still.

All around, the walls smouldered and fumed. Chôn wet his belt sash and wrapped it around his face. Treading quietly, keeping one eye out for any twitch of the deadly tail, he laid the deerskin out on the rock. With his knife he scraped the stinking, smoking shit off the rocks, piling it up in pools of water. There was a big pile of shit close to the beast’s rump, but he thought it wise to leave it there. Once his collection had cooled, he sifted it with his fingers, feeling for the coffee berries. He washed them off in the waterfall. They were partially digested, still warm from the flames. Even through his makeshift mask they smelt aromatic, a hint of caramel from the flame and the heavy musk of the beast itself. He piled them into the centre of the pelt and tied the corners crosswise to form a carrying sack.

Chôn hefted the bag—maybe two kilos. He wrapped it securely in his sash and tied it to his chest. The beast was still lying still, torpid. Its flanks moved slightly with each breath but with long pauses between. It must be unconscious or close to death.

Chôn took a deep breath of his own. This was the moment to tempt death one last time. He pushed himself back against the wall then jumped forward, leaping over the tail and onto the beast’s back. Small spines gave him a footing on the slippery scales. The tail lashed out, but too late. He jumped again, onto the shoulder and then over to one side before landing awkwardly on the loose stones and rolling to safety.

He stopped and turned back to see the beast struggle to lift its head and half open one eye.

Clutching the bundle to his chest, Chôn pushed his palms together in obeisance and bowed low to the creature. Head down, chin snuggled up against the bundle, he was enveloped in the smell of musk and burnt chocolate.

“Thank you, Lord of the Mountain, for this Thy boon. Please allow me to descend safely to the river to return to my fiancée and child-to-be and I will not bother Thee again.”

A tremor ran through the great body of the beast and its head slumped down again, the golden eye slowly closing.

He had succeeded! And he had survived! Silently, Chôn thanked the mountain spirits as he turned and began slipping and hopping his way down the hill, one arm clutching the bundle, his other hand holding on to the pouch with his last areca nut.

He called out to the forest in triumph. He had conquered the Beast on the Mountain! He, Chôn the hunter would be the first to bring the new Emperor a bag of the fabled
Cà phê rông
—the Dragon’s Coffee of legend!

* * *

ASIM
congratulates Robert Porteous on his first publication.

I’ve always loved reading spec-fiction, but I never thought of myself as a writer. I was over fifty when I first started noticing that I had stories of my own running around in my head. I ignored them at first—they were just daydreams after all—until one day, a bit over a year ago, I wrote down my first short story. A few months later, I joined the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild and haven’t stopped writing since: a new story or two every month, usually in a different genre. This is my first fantasy quest story (you know the one: with a poor orphan who dreams of marrying the princess, and there’s a mysterious prophecy, and a monster to defeat).

I guess one inspiration came from a visit, years ago, to the San Francisco Zoo. I was standing a couple of metres away from a huge male lion when he roared. I could feel the sound vibrating through my whole body, turning my guts to water. So when my thoughts turned to writing a quest story, I wanted the questing beast to feel that real.

I also wanted to take this story out of the generic medieval setting so I placed it amongst the steep limestone sugar-cone mountains I’d seen while travelling through Vietnam. Oh, and on those travels, I tried chewing betel and areca nut and tasted the famous
Ca phe chon
coffee, made from the beans eaten and partially digested by the Vietnamese civet (
Chon
). The beans are collected from the civet’s droppings, washed and then … lightly roasted!

…David Luntz

(This poem first appeared in
Mastodon Dentist
in 2007)

We are by the sea at night, not dreaming,

just sleepwalking through time’s dark

asylum, spellbound in solitude, wondering

whether fashioning a man from dust is more

perverse than creating an endless universe.

The stars drift across the face of the ancient

seabed. They seem to cry out,

There are no mirrors here, only windows
.

Beyond, in the woods, moonlight

soaks up the lachrymose dew, sullen pools

reflecting birches and oaks in amber hues.

Birches and oaks tense in the breeze.

Shadows shiver on the dews’ taut skin.

These tender the illusion that the gods

have not abandoned us, while the single

path through the woods winds gently

to the end of memory and anticipation.

The Iron Lighthouse

…C A L

From the calm silence of his close orbit, Hesp contemplated the freezing matter of the nebula he had woven. Faint currents of dust moved around him in the vacuum, stirred by his breath and the movement of his heart. His presence warmed the surrounding space by a few degrees, keeping at arm’s length the absolute cold, the extinct nothing, time’s end.

Which was not quite yet, though it might have seemed that way.

The universe was dry as parchment, drier.

For untold millennia, rivers of light had poured across deep channels carved between the galaxies, swept by the strong galactic tide of gravitation. Then, as the shells of stars became red with oxygen and then ringed with great thermonuclear shackles of iron, a drought took hold, and the rivers soon dried darkly in their expanding dusty beds. Now, if there was any energy left in the universe at all, it lay beyond his horizon, out of his reach.

His only friend had gone that way, seeking the last of the light.

He recalled the last message sent by the Captain:

“By the time you receive this, I will most likely have been dead for many millions of my years—and hell only knows how many of yours. There is only darkness ahead of me now, the last stars are going out. Even you, my old friend, even you will freeze at the end of time. Farewell—and may whatever fates you trust be kind.”

Hesp had been exiled into solitude once before. He would not go there again, not without a fight …

* * *

He had met the Captain long ago in the shadows of twilight, somewhere between vengeance and regret. In the beginning he wasn’t sure what it was that inspired him to make contact, since he had long ago encountered others of that race and regarded them somewhat in the manner of insects; tenacious and irritating—something to be squashed underfoot if at all possible. The vacuum of space dismembered them and they required pressure shells to protect them—their soft acquaintance hardly seemed worth the trouble.

But he had been without company a long while, the oceans of space were vast and empty, and by now were also very, very cold.

He merged through the walls of the Captain’s vessel, feeling the icy caress of metal weave around and within him.