Young Warriors Read Free Page B

peace?”
    He smiled. “Come into my house.” He put his hand on my shoulder to guide me toward the doorway. “We will drink and eat. We will talk and smoke, and talk some more . . .”
    Time for a mountain is a different thing from the time of a man.
    I drank from the gourds of the owner. I ate strange and delicious meats from his bowls. I smoked his cigar, which smelled of flowers. It seemed that we passed an hour or two together. I told him of the coming war, and also of the message I was carrying to my brother. He laughed. He laughed both times.
    When I came out of his house, it was into the light of dawn. That surprised me. Could I really have spent an entire night in conversation? I turned to remark on this, but the owner was gone. In the shadows, there was no stone house.
    I continued down the mountain. I sought the place where Baxmal and Chulchun had hidden themselves and spied. But I couldn’t find them. And when I climbed into the trees to peer down at the city of Scaled Jaguar . . .
    There was only jungle. Dense jungle everywhere, over what had been fields. Trees covered the palaces and temples. They looked just like tiny hills.
    The roads back to my own city were overgrown. Jungle came down to the banks of the river, as if no one had ever cut firewood there. In the valley of my home, it was the same as with the city of Scaled Jaguar. Everything was overgrown. I could find no sign of any other human being.
    Birds and monkeys called to one another.
    I was alone.
    This was the Lord of Rain Mountain’s gift of peace.
    BRUCE HOLLAND ROGERS
    BRUCE HOLLAND ROGERS lives and writes in Eugene, Oregon, the tie-dye capital of the world. He speaks Spanish, and his visits to Mexico and Central America have inspired his interest in the pre-Columbian cultures of that region. “My mesoamerican fantasies are only loosely based on real cultures, ” he says, “just as Tolkien’s work is loosely European. It seems funny to me that heroic fantasy writers largely stick to European settings when we have the entire world’s traditions of magic and heroes to explore.”
    Bruce’s fiction is all over the map. Some of it is science fiction, some is fantasy, some is literary. He has written mysteries, experimental fiction, and work that’s hard to label. Bruce has won the Pushcart Prize, two Nebula Awards, and the Bram Stoker Award. He is probably best known for his short-short stories, some of which appear online at www.shortshortshort.com . He is married to Holly Arrow, a professor of social psychology at the University of Oregon. You can learn more about him on his personal Web page at www.sff.net/people/bruce .

THE MAGESTONE
    S. M. and Jan Stirling
    FARE TOSSED THE BUCKET of kitchen scraps over the
Osprey
’s rail, then paused to stare out across the heaving green-gray waters, fascinated. He’d never before been more than a day’s walk from the farm where he’d been born, and now it seemed like a vanished dream. Even seabirds didn’t come out this far. It was like walking on the beach searching for clams and driftwood, yet not like it. There he walked on the water’s edge and looked out across it westward; here the creaking, pitching round-ship was a tiny wooden chip lost in an endlessness of foam and salt-smelling spray without form or direction.
    Fare reached into his tunic and pulled out the strange stone his mother had given him the night before he’d left, holding it out until the chain pinched the skin on the back of his neck.
    The chain’s silver,
he thought. Worth more than the stone, but . . .
    The stone was gray, ridged in subtle patterns that hinted at a multicolored shine, like the inside of an oyster shell almost worn away by the sea.
    â€œYour father found it in a fish’s belly and carried it for luck,” his mother had told him, putting it in his hand. With a soft smile, she’d folded Fare’s fingers over it. “He