Fiddler Fair (anthology)

sacked, and half the boys with him. And they’d all decided to drown their sorrows together.

But not at a pub, and not at pub prices. You can’t get royally, roaring drunk at a pub unless you’ve got a royal allowance to match. So we all bought our bottles and met at Tommy’s place.

There’d been a half-formed notion to get shellacked there, but Tommy had a car, and Tommy had an idea. He’d seen some nonsense on the telly about “Iron Johns” or some such idiocy, over in America—

Said we was all downtrodden and “needed to get in touch with our inner selves”; swore that we had to get “empowered” to get back on our feet, and wanted to head out into the country— There’d been some talk about “male bonding” ceremonies, pounding drums, carrying on like a lot of Red Indians—and drinking of course. Tommy went on like it was some kind of communion; the rest of them had already started on their bottles before they got to Tommy’s, and at that point, a lot of pounding and dancing half-naked and drinking sounded like a fine idea. So off they went, crammed into Tommy’s aging Morris Minor with just enough room to get their bottles to their lips.

At some point they stopped and all piled out; Michael vaguely recalled a forest, which might well have been National Trust lands and it was a mercy they hadn’t been caught and hauled off to gaol. Tommy had gotten hold of a drum somewhere; it was in the boot with the rest of the booze. They all grabbed bottles and Tommy got the drum, and off they went into the trees like a daft May Day parade, howling and carrying on like bleeding loonies.

How Tommy made the fire—and why it hadn’t been seen, more to the point!—Michael had not a clue. He remembered a great deal of pounding on the drum, more howling, shouting and swearing at the bosses of the world, a lot of drinking, and some of the lads stripping off their shirts and capering about like so many monkeys. About then was when I got an itch for some quiet. He and his bottles had stumbled off into the trees, following an elusive moonbeam, or so he thought he remembered. The singing and pounding had faded behind him, and in his memory the trees loomed the way they had when he was a nipper and everything seemed huge. They were like trees out of the old tales, as big as the one they call Robin Hood’s Oak in Sherwood. There was only one way to go since he didn’t even consider turning back, and that was to follow the path between them, and the fey bit of moonlight that lured him on.

Was there a mist? I think there was. Wait! That was when the real path appeared. There had been mist, a curious, blue mist. It had muffled everything, from the sounds of his own footsteps to the sounds of his mates back by the fire. Before too very long, he might have been the only human being alive in a forest as old as time and full of portentous silence.

He remembered that the trees thinned out at just about the point where he was going to give up his ramble and turn back. He had found himself on the shores of a lake. It was probably an ordinary enough pond by daylight, but last night, with the mist drifting over it and obscuring the farther shore, the ­utter and complete silence of the place, and the moonlight pouring down over everything and touching ­everything with silver, it had seemed . . . uncanny, a bit frightening, and not entirely in the real world at all.

He had stood there with a bottle in each hand, a monument to inebriation, held there more by ­inertia than anything else, he suspected. He could still see the place as he squeezed his eyes shut, as vividly as if he stood there at that moment. The water was like a sheet of plate glass over a dark and unimaginable void; the full moon hung just above the dark mass of the trees behind him, a great round Chinese lantern of a moon, and blue-white mist floated everywhere in wisps and thin scarves and great opaque billows. A curious boat rested by the bank not a meter from him, a rough-hewn thing apparently made from a whole tree-trunk and shaped with an axe. Not even the reeds around the boat at his feet moved in the breathless quiet.

Then, breaking the quiet, a sound; a single splash in the middle of the lake. Startled, he had seen an arm rise up out of the water, beckoning.

He thought, of course, that someone had fallen in, or been swimming and took a cramp. One of his mates, even, who’d come round to the other side and taken a fancy for a dip. It never occurred to him to go back to the others for help, just as it never ­occurred to him not to rush out there to save whoever it was.

He dropped his bottles into the boat at his feet, and followed them in. He looked about for the tether to cast off, but there wasn’t one—looked for the oars to row out to the swimmer, but there weren’t any of those, either. Nevertheless, the boat was moving, and heading straight for that beckoning arm as if he was willing it there. And it didn’t seem at all strange to him that it was doing so, at least, not at the time.

He remembered that he’d been thinking that whoever this was, she’d fallen in fully clothed, for the arm had a long sleeve of some heavy white stuff. And it had to be a she—the arm was too white and soft to be a man’s. It wasn’t until he got up close, though, that he realized there was nothing showing but the arm, that the woman had been under an awfully long time—and that the arm sticking up out of the ­water was holding something.

Still, daft as it was, it wasn’t important— He’d ignored everything but the arm, ignored things that didn’t make any sense. As the boat got within range of the woman, he’d leaned over the bow so far that he almost fell in, and made a grab for that upraised arm.

But the hand and wrist slid through his grasp somehow, although he was sure he’d taken a good, firm hold on them, and he fell back into the boat, knocking himself silly against the hard wooden bottom, his hands clasped tight around whatever it was she’d been holding. He saw stars, and more than stars, and when he came to again, the boat was back against the bank, and there was no sign of the woman.

But he had her sword.

Her sword? I had her sword?

Now he reached behind him to feel the long, hard length of it at his back.

By God—it is a sword!

He had no real recollection of what happened after that; he must have gotten back to the lads, and they all must have gotten back to town in Tommy’s car, because here he was.

In bed with a sword.

I’ve heard of being in bed with a battle-axe, but never a sword.

Slowly, carefully, he sat up. Slowly, carefully, he reached into the tumble of blankets and extracted the drowning woman’s sword.

It was real, it looked old, and it was damned heavy. He hefted it in both hands, and grunted with surprise. If this was the kind of weapon those old bastards used to hack at one another with in the long-ago days that they