Songs of the Dying Earth. Gardner Dozois

for us,” said Unthan Vyorn, “which was the crossing of the Mountain of the Eleven Uncertainties.”

      “Ah,” said Puillayne. “I know it well.” It was a place of bewildering confusion, where a swarm of identical peaks confronted the traveler and all roads seemed alike, though only one was correct and the others led into dire unpleasantness. “But you found your way through, evidently, and coped with equal deftness with the Gate of Ghosts just beyond, and the perilous Pillars of Yan Sfou.”

      “The hope of attaining the very place where now we find ourselves drew us onward through all obstacles,” Unthan Vyorn said, outdoing even himself in unctuosity of tone. And again he quoted Puillayne:

       The mountain roads we traveled rose ten thousand cilavers high.

       The rivers we crossed were more turbulent than a hundred demons.

       And our voices were lost in the thunder of the cataracts.

       We cut through brambles that few swords could slash.

       And then beyond the mists we saw the golden Klorpentine

       And it was as if we had never known hardship at all.

      How barbarously he attacked the delicate lines! How flat was his tone as he came to the ecstatic final couplet! But Puillayne masked his scorn. These were foreigners; they were his guests, however self-invited they might be; his responsibility was to maintain them at their ease. And he found them diverting, in their way. His life in these latter years had slipped into inflexible routine. The advent of poetry-quoting northern barbarians was an amusing interlude in his otherwise constricted days. He doubted more than ever, now, Gimbiter’s hypothesis that they meant him harm. There seemed nothing dangerous about these three except, perhaps, the chilly eyes of the one who did not seem to speak. His friend Gimbiter evidently had mistaken bumptiousness for malversation and malefic intent.

      Fur-swathed Kesztrel Tsaye said, “We know, too, that you are a collector of exotica. Therefore we bring some humble gifts for your delight.” And he, too, offered a brief quotation:

       Let me have pleasures in this life

       For the next is a dark abyss!

      “If you will, Malion Gainthrust—”

      Kesztrel Tsaye nodded to the icy-eyed silent man, who produced from somewhere a sack that Puillayne had not previously noticed, and drew from it a drum of red candana covered with taut-stretched thaupin-hide, atop which nine red-eyed homunculi performed an obscene dance. This was followed by a little sphere of green chalcedony out of which a trapped and weeping demon peered, and that by a beaker which overflowed with a tempting aromatic yellow liquid that tumbled to the floor and rose again to return to the vessel from which it had come. Other small toys succeeded those, until gifts to the number of ten or twelve sat arrayed before Puillayne.

      During this time, Puillayne had consumed nearly all the wine from the flask he had reserved for himself, and he felt a cheering dizziness beginning to steal over him. The three visitors, though he had offered them only a third as much apiece, had barely taken any. Were they simply abstemious? Or was the shimmering wine of Sanreale too subtle for their jackanapes palates?

      He said, when it appeared that they had exhausted their display of gewgaws for him, “If this wine gives you little gratification, I can select another and perhaps superior one for you, or we could open that which you have brought me.”

      “It is superb wine, master,” Unthan Vyorn said, “and we would expect no less from you. We know, after all, that your cellar is incomparable, that it is a storehouse of the most treasured wines of all the world, that in fact it contains even the unobtainable wine prized beyond all others, the True Vintage of Erzuine Thale. This Sanreale wine you have offered us is surely not in a class with that; but it has much merit in its own way and if we drink it slowly, it is because we cherish every swallow we take. Simply to be drinking the wine of Puillayne of Ghiusz in the veritable home of Puillayne of Ghiusz is an honor so extreme that it constringes our throats with joy, and compels us to drink more slowly than otherwise we might.”

      “You know of the True Vintage, do you?” Puillayne asked.

      “Is there anyone who does not? The legendary wine of the Nolwaynes who have reigned in Gammelcor since the days when the sun had the brightness of gold—the wine of miracles, the wine that offers the keenest of ecstasies that it is possible to experience—the wine that opens all doors to one with a single sip—” Unshielded covetousness now gleamed in the lanky man’s eyes. “If only we could enjoy that sip! Ah, if only we could merely have a glimpse of the container that holds that wondrous elixir!”

      “I rarely bring it forth, even to look at it,” said Puillayne. “I fear that if I were to take it from its place of safekeeping, I would be tempted to consume it prematurely, and that is not a temptation to which I am ready to yield.”

      “A man of iron!” marveled Kesztrel Tsaye. “To possess the True Vintage of Erzuine Thale, and to hold off from sampling it! And why, may I ask, do you scruple to deny yourself that joy of joys?”

      It was a question Puillayne had heard many times before, for his ownership of the True Vintage was not something he had concealed from his friends. “I am, you know, a prodigious scribbler of minor verse. Yes,” he said, over their indignant protests, “minor verse, such a torrent of it that it would fill this manse a dozen times over if I preserved it all. I keep only a small part.” He gestured moodily at the fifty volumes bound in Deodand vellum. “But somewhere within me lurks the one great poem that will recapitulate all the striving of earthly history, the epic that will be the sum and testament of us who live as we do on the precipice at the edge of the end of days. Someday I will feel that poem brimming at the perimeters of my brain and demanding release. That feeling will come, I think, when our sun is in its ultimate extremity, and the encroaching darkness is about to arrive. And then, only then, will I broach the seal on the True Vintage, and quaff the legendary wine, which indeed opens all doors, including the door of creation, so that its essence will liberate the real poet within me, and in my final drunken joy I will be permitted to set down that one great poem that I yearn to write.”

      “You do us all an injustice, master, if you wait to write that epic until the very eve of our doom,” said Unthan Vyorn in a tone of what might almost have been sorrow sincerely framed. “For how will we be able to read it, when all has turned to ice and darkness? No poems will circulate among us as we lie there perishing in the final cold. You deny us your greatness! You withhold your gift!”

      “Be that as it may,” Puillayne said, “the time is not yet for opening that bottle. But I can offer you others.”

      From his cabinet, he selected a generous magnum of ancient Falernian, which bore a frayed label, yellowed and parched by time. The great rounded flask lacked its seal and it was obvious to all that the container was empty save for random crusts of desiccated dregs scattered about its interior. His visitors regarded it with puzzlement. “Fear not,” said Puillayne. “A mage of my acquaintance made certain of my bottles subject to the Spell of Recrudescent Fluescence, among them this one. It is inexhaustibly renewable.”

      He turned his head aside and gave voice to the words, and, within moments, miraculous liquefaction commenced. While the magnum was filling, he summoned a new set of goblets, which he filled near to brimming for his guests and himself.

      “It is a wondrous wine,” said Kesztrel Tsaye after a sip or two. “Your hospitality knows no bounds, master.” Indeed, such parts of his heavily bearded face that were visible were beginning to show a ruddy radiance. Unthan Vyorn likewise displayed the effects of the potent stuff, and even the taciturn Malion Gainthrust, sitting somewhat apart as though he had no business in this room, seemed to evince some reduction of his habitual glower.

      Puillayne smiled benignly, sat back, let tranquility steal over him. He had not expected to be drinking the Falernian today, for it was a forceful wine, especially at this early