Exit, Pursued by a Bear Read online

  Yet Ben insensibly, with all the room, was leaning inward, all one O.

  Still music. Waking light. (A candle through a scarf of silk, rose madder.) Of that light, she borrowed light, that seemed to kindle in her cheek. So like the dawning moon, she stood a space between two elements: uncertainly of stone, of air. When she drew breath, all there outbreathed, conspired in the spell. Ah. Blood moved in her, life waked. Hermione descended.

  O she’s warm

  If this be magic, let it be an art

  Lawful as eating

  And that’s how it’s done. When Ben looked, Will had gone.

  On Watling Street

  At the sign of the Rider—a centaur with a bow—Kit drank tobacco. All down Watling Street, which lay upon the Southwark side of Paradise, he’d boyed, drunk, diced, and railed upon his fortune in good thunderous lines.

  At the Two White Boys, he’d sported with the two: players, brothers, and alike as hand and hand, save that one or another—turn about as in a comedy—wore petticoats. Thirteen: and wick as monkeys, old in vice.

  As he came into the street, a roaring boy, with dog at heel, drew sword on him. Each killed the other three or four times running: vauntingly; without a word; with cunning; grimly hacking; swiftly, with a single thrust. Good sport, when neither bled.

  At the Bull, he saw a play of seven sisters: which he made, in Greek, and saw acted, even as he thought.

  At the Wain, there was Kentish cherry cider that his aunt had brewed.

  At the Queen, there lay a night-black whore, stark naked, but for living gold that serpentined her body. At her cloudless cheek she wore the moon itself. Past full? Its rounding yet to come? It changed. And as her kneeling women tended her, she lay asprawl, and pinched and coyed them, pleasuring where she did hurt, still telling Kit what men had shrieked in dying, muttered in their sleep with her. Secrets of state. Of millennia: for she was old as Egypt; suppliants of Persia, Athens, Alexandria, and Troy had lain with her. Near sleeping, she repeated Sappho’s verses that were made to her. She’d forgotten nothing.

  At the Swan and Cittern, there was sweet music of a consort, goose with apples, and a brawl. Outside, stood a mountebank that cried his cures of snake’s tongue and of powdered scorpion.

  Now in the Rider, Kit played cards with a one-eyed bearward, all in shag-barked tatters, like a city sylvan. Across the room, he saw a flash of yellow hair: a snub-nosed boy with clever hands. Would he go up with me?

  “There’s none that lies here,” said the bearward, answering. Though he’d spoken not aloud. “Turns ’em out afore dawn.”

  “Who keeps this house?”

  The bearward drank. “Old Jump-At-Her. That has more wives than Harry.” And as a door was opened by a potboy’s knee, Kit heard a raucous scolding from the backward of the inn. Followed by a crash, as of a dresser full of plates and knives.

  “What’s beyond?”

  “Globes.”

  “New worlds?” said Kit. “Like Alexander’s worlds, to conquer?”

  “Conkers? Nay, like Globes. Playhouses.”

  Kit drank down. “To act in? Not to play, but act?”

  “Aye.”

  Kit pushed his cup aside.

  “Time,” said Arcturus.

  And as Kit felt by habit for his purse, the other said, “Leave it. Thy reckoning’s paid.”

  The door stood open to the sky. A wind blew back his flame-red hair. And Kit looked out upon a roaring up of light, a whirling and a blaze of sparks: the stithy of creation. And by chance—by endlessness of chance—the fire made the hand. Of nothing. Anything. He laughed out loud.

  atque metus omnis et inexorabile fatum

  subiecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis avari[4]

  And jumped.

  Galileo, turning from his glass, took up his little calf, his notebook, and a pen. He sketched the star, and noted: Nova cometa. Subrufa. A new comet, somewhat red.

  [After this, they danced their last dance into the work;

  And with a full SONG the star vanished,

  and the whole machine closed.]

  [1] “Do you ask who he is? The name’s escaped me.” Martial, Epigrams I.96.

  [2] “O horses of the night, run slowly, slowly!” Marlowe (quoting Ovid), Dr. Faustus V.ii; Amores I.13.40.

  [3] “This mooncalf? An elf begot him on an ape.” Alexander Montgomerie, The Flyting Betwixt Montgomerie and Polwart.

  [4] “. . . and has trampled underfoot all fear and inexorable fate and the roar of greedy Acheron.” Virgil, Georgics II.491-2.

  Acknowledgments

  This story came to me—whoosh!—like a falling star, between bites of a strawberry, at tea with friends.

  I am fortunate in knowing writers. Thanks, above all and as ever, to Sonya Taaffe, from whose marvellous Kit I kindled mine; and to Tili Sokolov and Lila Garrott. They saw him streak across the sky, called out, and caught him falling.

  Many thanks to my percipient close readers: Sonya and Lila, first and last; Tili, who wrote the text for hypertext; Faye Ringel, who (as ever) inked the thorns; and Catherine Rockwood, latest but not least of the Sirenaics, who saw this story finished “to the naile.”

  I am twice fortunate to work with Small Beer Press, who asked me for another Ben. As you see, they’ve turned him out exquisitely. My thrice-delighted thanks to Kathleen Jennings for her Great and Lesser Bears.

  About the Author

  Greer Gilman’s mythic fictions Moonwise and Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales have (between them) won the Tiptree, World Fantasy, and Crawford Awards, and have been shortlisted for the Nebula and Mythopoeic awards. Besides her two books, she has published a companion novella to Exit, Pursued by a Bear, Cry Murder! in a Small Voice, and other short work, poetry, and criticism. Her essay on “The Languages of the Fantastic” appears in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature. A graduate of Wellesley College and the University of Cambridge, and for many years a librarian at Harvard, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She likes to quip that she does everything James Joyce ever did, only backward and in high heels.

  Small Beer Press is an independent publishing house. Recent titles include:

  Greer Gilman, Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales

  Winner of the Tiptree Award · Mythopoeic Award finalist

  Inventive, playful, and erudite, Cloud & Ashes is a slow whirlwind of language, a button box of words, a mythic Joycean fable that will invite immersion, study, revisitation, and delight.

  “Gilman fills your mouth with wincing tastes, your ears with crowcalls, knockings and old, old rhythms, your eyes with beautiful and battered creatures, sly-eyed, luminous or cackling as they twine and involute their stories.”—Margo Lanagan, author of Sea Hearts

  Greer Gilman, Cry Murder! in a Small Voice

  Shirley Jackson Award finalist

  Someone is murdering boy players and Ben Jonson, in the way that only Greer Gilman

  could write him—“Fie, poetastery.”—is compelled to investigate.

  “What is a story but the dance of words? Greer Gilman’s language is always demanding: even short declarative sentences resonate with layers of meaning. The longer cadences are nimble, tricky on the tongue and in that place in the brain where deliberate allusions float like wisps of smoke on a winter morning or snap as flags in a furious gale.”— Henry Wessells, The Endless Bookshelf

  Hal Duncan, The A-Z of the Fantastic City

  Illustrated throughout by Eric Schaller

  “Leads readers and explorers through twenty-six cities of yore (Yore, while included, is one of the shorter entries), including such familiar and unfamiliar haunts as “Loving, clever, entertaining, and of course . . . quite excellently written.”—Rich Horton, Locus

  Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria

  “With characteristic wit, poise, and eloquence, Samatar delivers a story about our vulnerability to language and literature, and the simultaneous experience of power and surrender inherent in the acts of wri
ting and reading.”—Amal El-Mohtar, Tor.com

  Susan Stinson, Spider in a Tree

  “Stinson reads the natural world as well as Scripture, searching for meaning. But instead of the portents of an angry god, what she finds there is something numinous, complicated, and

  radiantly human.”—Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home

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