Fiddler Fair (anthology)

“Let!” he laughed. “Haven’t we made it plain enough we’ve been trying to lure you like coney-catchers? Oh, you’re one of us, Rune, lass. You’ll not escape us now!”

“Then—what am I supposed to do?”

 “You heal, that’s the first thing. The second, well, we don’t have formal apprenticeships amongst us. By the Three, there’s no few things you could serve as Master in, and no question about it! You could teach most of us a bit about fiddling, for one—”

“But—” she looked and felt dismayed, “—one of the reasons I wanted to join the Guild was to learn! I can’t read nor write music; there’s so many instruments I can’t play—” her voice rose to a soft wail “—how am I going to learn if a Master won’t take me as an appren­tice?”

“Enough! Enough! No more weeping and wailing, my heart’s over-soft as it is!” he said hastily. “If you’re going to insist on being an apprentice, I suppose there’s nothing for it. Will I do as a Master to you?”

Rune was driven to speechlessness, and could only nod.

“Holy Three, lass, you make a liar out of me, who swore never to take an apprentice! Wait a moment.” He vanished around the curtain for a moment, then returned. “Here—” He set down a tiny harp. “This can be played one-handed, and learning the ways of her will keep you too busy to bedew me with any more tears while your arm mends. Treat her gently—she’s my own very first instrument, and she deserves respect.”

Rune cradled the harp in her good arm, too awe-stricken to reply.

“We’ll send someone in the morning for your things, wherever it is you’ve cached ’em. Lean back there—oh, it’s a proper nursemaid I am—” He made her comfortable on her pillows, covering her with blankets and moving her two—no, three—new ­instruments to a place of safety, but still within sight. He seemed to understand how seeing them made her feel. “We’ll find you clothing and the like as well. That sleepy-juice they gave you should have you nodding shortly. Just remember one thing ­before you doze off. I’m not going to be an easy Master to serve; you won’t be spending your days lazing about, you know! Come morning, I’ll set you your very first task. You’ll teach me—” his eyes lighted with unfeigned eagerness “—that ghost-song!”

The Enemy of My Enemy

Not long after I was accepted into the Magic in Ithkar anthology, the late Robert Adams who was the co-editor asked me to participate in his Friends of the Horseclans anthologies as well. I was happy to, since I liked Robert a great deal, and this was the result, which appeared in Volume Two.

Robert was an odd duck; you either liked him and chuckled over his eccentricities, or you passionately hated him. His most popular books, the “Horseclans” series, have not weathered the change in political climate well. For some background, they are set in a distant future following a nuclear war in which (apparently) the U.S. and the Soviet Union both bombed each other back to the Stone Age. The hero of the earliest books is immortal and telepathic, having evidently stood in the right place at the wrong time as one of the nukes hit. He decides to single-handedly bring civilization in the U.S. back up to par, mostly by uniting the remains of the population with the Native Americans who, being on remote reservations, survived intact. The villains of the books are the Greeks, who sustained very little damage, since it seems that none of the greater powers thought they were worth bombing back to the Stone Age. They proceed to flourish and conquer in the tradition of Alexander, eventually moving on to the North American continent. However, thanks to better living through radiation, there are telepathic horses and mutated, large cats in North America, both of which have teamed up with the Horseclans-folk.

In those more innocent times, no one raised the objection that all that long-term radiation would probably render the population sterile rather than producing beneficial mutations; the concept of Nuclear Winter hadn’t even occurred to anyone. But the possibility of a Third World/First Nuclear War was very real.

One of the obsessions of the more devoted of Horseclans fans was to try and figure out just what the real place-names and proper names were of the locations and characters; Robert had some formula by which he took English names and places, distorted and then phonetically re-spelled them. Some of them I never could figure out.

At any rate, it occurred to me that there was another, highly mobile ethnic group that could have survived Robert’s WWIII by being outside the cities; the gypsies, who would have strenuously resisted being absorbed into the Horseclans as they have strenuously resisted being absorbed into ­every other culture they have come into contact with.

The fierce heat radiating from the forge was enough to deaden the senses all by itself, never mind the creaking and moaning of the bellows and the steady tap-tapping of Kevin’s youngest apprentice out in the yard working at his assigned horseshoe. The stoutly-built stone shell was pure hell to work in from May to October; you could open windows and doors to the fullest, but heat soon built up to the point where thought ceased, the mind went numb, and the world narrowed to the task at hand.

But Kevin Floyd was used to it, and he was alive enough to what was going on about him that he sensed that someone had entered his smithy, although he dared not interrupt his work to see who it was. This was a commissioned piece—and one that could cost him dearly if he did a less-than-perfect job of completing it. Even under the best of circumstances the tempering of a swordblade was always a touchy bit of business. The threat of his overlord’s wrath—and the implied loss of his shop—did not make it less so.

So he dismissed the feeling of eyes on the back of his neck, and went on with the work stolidly. For the moment he would ignore the visitor as he ­ignored the heat, the noise, and the stink of scorched leather and many long summers’ worth of sweat—horse-sweat and man-sweat—that permeated the forge. Only when the blade was safely quenched and lying on the anvil for the next step did he turn to see who his visitor was.

He almost overlooked her entirely, she was so small, and was tucked up so invisibly in the shadowy corner where he kept oddments of harness and a pile of leather scraps. Dark, nearly black eyes peered up shyly at him from under a tangled mop of curling black hair as she perched atop his heap of leather bits, hugging her thin knees to her chest. Kevin didn’t recognize her.

That, since he knew every man, woman and child in Northfork by name, was cause for a certain alarm.

He made one step toward her. She shrank back into the darkness of the corner, eyes going wide with fright. He sighed. “Kid, I ain’t gonna hurt you—”

She looked terrified. Unfortunately, Kevin frequently had that effect on children, much as he liked them. He