Swanwick, Michael - A Midwinters Tale

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Asimov's Science Fiction - A Midwinter's Tale by Michael Swanwick

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Michael Swanwick: A Midwinter's Tale

illo for Jack Faust

Every Christmas

Eve, the Swanwick

family partakes in the curious Victorian

custom of spinning Christmas ghost stories.

Mr. Swanwick tells us that "A Midwinter’s

Tale" began as his contribution to this eerie

tradition, and that the story was partly

inspired by "The Soldier Drinks"-a haunting

painting by Marc Chagall.

Maybe I shouldn’t

tell you about that

childhood Christmas

Eve in the Stone

House, so long ago.

My memory is no

longer reliable, not

since I contracted

the brain fever. Soon

I’ll be strong enough

to be reposted offplanet, to some obscure star light years beyond

that plangent moon rising over your father’s barn, but how much has

been burned from my mind! Perhaps none of this actually happened.

Sit on my lap and I’ll tell you all. Well then, my knee. No woman was

ever ruined by a knee. You laugh, but it’s true. Would that it were so

easy!

The hell of war as it’s now practiced is that its purpose is not so

much to gain territory as to deplete the enemy, and thus it’s always

better to maim than to kill. A corpse can be bagged, burned, and

forgotten, but the wounded need special care. Regrowth tanks, false

skin, medical personnel, a long convalescent stay on your parents’

farm. That’s why they will vary their weapons, hit you with obsolete

stone axes or toxins or radiation, to force your Command to stock

the proper prophylaxes, specialized medicines, obscure skills.

Mustard gas is excellent for that purpose, and so was the brain

fever.

All those months I lay in the hospital, awash in pain, sometimes

hallucinating. Dreaming of ice. When I awoke, weak and not really

believing I was alive, parts of my life were gone, randomly burned

from my memory. I recall standing at the very top of the iron bridge

over the Izveltaya, laughing and throwing my books one by one into

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"A Midwinter's

Tale" by Michael

Swanwick,

by Michael

Swanwick, used

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Michael%20Swanwick%20-%20A%20Midwinters%20Tale.htm (1 of 15) [12/30/2004 8:07:22 PM]

Asimov's Science Fiction - A Midwinter's Tale by Michael Swanwick

the river, while my best friend Fennwolf tried to coax me down. "I’ll

join the militia! I’ll be a soldier!" I shouted hysterically. And so I did. I

remember that clearly but just what led up to that preposterous

instant is utterly beyond me. Nor can I remember the name of my

second-eldest sister, though her face is as plain to me as yours is

now. There are odd holes in my memory.

That Christmas Eve is an island of stability in my seachanging

memories, as solid in my mind as the Stone House itself, that

Neolithic cavern in which we led such basic lives that I was never

quite sure in which era of history we dwelt. Sometimes the men

came in from the hunt, a larl or two pacing ahead content and sleepy-

eyed, to lean bloody spears against the walls, and it might be that

we lived on Old Earth itself then. Other times, as when they brought

in projectors to fill the common room with colored lights, scintillae

nesting in the branches of the season’s tree, and cool, harmless

flames dancing atop the presents, we seemed to belong to a much

later age, in some mythologized province of the future.

The house was abustle, the five families all together for this one time

of the year, and outlying kin and even a few strangers staying over,

so that we had to put bedding in places normally kept closed during

the winter, moving furniture into attic lumberrooms, and even at that

there were cots and thick bolsters set up in the blind ends of

hallways. The women scurried through the passages, scattering

uncles here and there, now settling one in an armchair and plumping

him up like a cushion, now draping one over a table, cocking up a

mustachio for effect. A pleasant time.

Coming back from a visit to the kitchens, where a huge woman I did

not know, with flour powdering her big-freckled arms up to the

elbows, had shooed me away, I surprised Suki and Georg kissing in

the nook behind the great hearth. They had their arms about

each}other and I stood watching them. Suki was smiling, cheeks red

and round. She brushed her hair back with one hand so Georg could

nuzzle her ear, turning slightly as she did so, and saw me. She

gasped and they broke apart, flushed and startled.

Suki gave me a cookie, dark with molasses and a single stingy,

crystalized raisin on top, while Georg sulked. Then she pushed me

away, and I heard her laugh as she took Georg’s hand to lead him

away to some darker forest recess of the house.

Father came in, boots all muddy, to sling a brace of game birds

down on the hunt cabinet. He set his unstrung bow and quiver of

arrows on their pegs, then hooked an elbow atop the cabinet to

accept admiration and a hot drink from mother. The larl padded by,

quiet and heavy and content. I followed it around a corner, ancient

ambitions of riding the beast rising up within. I could see myself,

by permission of

the author

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Swanwick, Michael - A Midwinters Tale

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