Complete Short Fiction by Thomas Burnett Swann

Author:Thomas Burnett Swann [Swann, Thomas Burnett]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

The wagon lay on its back like a horseshoe crab, its carapace slashed with knives, and its entrails strewn in the shape of clothes and furnishings. A Veientine army, equipped with siege towers and battering rams, had recaptured Sutrium, and the Fauns and Centaurs, leaving the slaves to the justice of the conquerors, had fled to the woods in fury and vented their wrath on this handiwork of man.

Still, Arnth found, the wreckage was not irreparable. With the help of the Water Sprites, he righted the cart and mended the tattered canopy. With the help of those other sprites, Arnza and his friends, he fitted the bare interior with a pallet of animal skins, while Tanaquil wove a coverlet out of flamingo feathers.

Now, it was time to depart for Rome, the valorous little town which had recently exiled its Etruscan king, Tarquin the Proud, and declared its independence. The sprites sang and capered as he and Tanaquil took their seats. There were garlands around his neck, Tanaquil’s hair had become a garden of roses, and honeysuckle entwined the canopy and seemed to heal the recently mended tears.

“It’s like a harvest festival,” she whispered. “They might be carrying sheaves instead of flowers.”

He frowned. “It’s much too soon to sing. Have they forgotten her so easily?” To Arnth at least, brightness had gone from the Town of Walking Towers; swiftness from the waters. Scarcely a month had passed, and yet her people sang.

“Remember what she told you about Vel: ‘Don’t judge him. He is what he has always been.’ ”

“I know,” he said. “I know. I do love them in spite of their lightness. It’s just that I want them to be like her.”

“No one is.”

Ursus was in his harness, submissive, no longer irascible. He hardly seemed to care that he had lost the patch from his eye, or that the sprites had insisted on twining honeysuckle around his prodigious neck. He is getting old, thought Arnth. When we get to Rome, I will build a room for him, with a bed of straw and a honey pot filled to the brim.

He had to flick the reins to catch the bear’s attention. Ursus was not being stubborn. It was just that he seemed preoccupied. He was missing Vegoia.

“Farewell, Arnth!”

“Farewell, Tanaquil!”

“Mellonia sweeten your path!”

The wheels, liberally greased with olive oil, began to turn; the cart groaned into motion and rolled with quickening speed toward Sutrium, Veii, and liberated Rome. Behind and ahead of them marched the Water Sprites; martial now, vigilant for Fauns and Centaurs among the trees; guarding their human friends out of the Weirwoods.

Above them the Corn Sprites wheeled in fiery arcs, and Arnza dipped from the sky to tap Arnth’s nose with a last homely gesture of farewell.

“Good-bye, little friend,” Arnth cried, and Arnza’s smile grew mischievous as if to say: “If I see a Faun, DI spit in his ear for you!”

Tanaquil sat beside him as quietly as a statue. Her tunic became her. In the weeks on the lake she had tanned and hardened to the brown suppleness of a nymph.

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