Free The Wildside Book of Fantasy: 20 Great Tales of Fantasy by Fritz Leiber, Gene Wolfe, Robert E. Howard, Paul di Filippo, Lin Carter, Tanith Lee, Clark Ashton Smith, E. Hoffmann Price, Thomas Burnett Swann, Brian Stableford, John Gregory Betancourt, Brian McNaughton, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Clive Jackson, Darrell Schwetizer, Achmed Abdullah Page A

on her back, blinking, her talons thrust in the air.
    “Can we help you?” I asked.
    Like a stricken bat she breathed in whistling gasps. “Is she dead?”
    “Yes.”
    “Both of them, then.”
    “You saved my friend.”
    “Not for his sake.” The shrill voice had fallen to a whisper. “I did not want to waste him.”
    “Waste him?”
    The old lust flickered across her face. “Harpies are women. Women need males in order to propagate.” Her eyelids drooped. “Leave me now.”
    Frey insisted that he be allowed to walk, but Balder, inflexible, scooped him into his arms. “My bruder for vonce vill do as I say.”
    Frey smiled at us. “Bar,” he said, “ye lost the phoenix but ye vill find your Circe.”
    “Vill you?” mocked the Harpy.
    I looked back at her. “You know about Circe?” I thought of the jewels and gold we had seen in the nest. How had the Harpies come to own them? Why had the phoenix lured us from our ship?
    “You know about Circe?” I repeated.
    She was dead, smiling evilly.
    IV: THE ISLAND OF OLEANDERS

    For several days the coast was mountainous, with arc-shaped bays where we moored in the late afternoons and fished for our supper; then it was low and sandy, with dunes like giant turtles scattered at the edge of the sea. On the fifth day after the Harpies, we rounded a promontory beetling with trees, and Astyanax, who had taken Aruns’ place as lookout, called to us from the bow.
    “Pygmies,” he pointed. “Swinging in the branches.”
    “That’s not pygmies,” Balder snorted. “It’s monkeys! I saw vone in Graviscae vonce. He came on a ship from Egypt.”
    “Pygmies,” the Triton repeated. “Monkeys have longer tails.”
    “Not all of them,” I explained. “This is the stub-tailed macaque. Notice their puffy cheeks and—“
    “Monkeys, then,” he said with composure, and continued his observation.
    On the sixth day we came to a marsh of corn-brakes beside a river. Elephants fed on low, scrubby trees and birds hopped from back to back with, apparently, the entire approval of their host. Frey and Balder, who had never seen an elephant, were terrified.
    “Fabulous beasts,” Frey muttered. “Do you think they will eat us?”
    “You and Balder, perhaps,” said Astyanax. “I am not edible. At least the captain didn’t think so.”
    I had to explain that an elephant’s trunk was not, as it looked, a serpent appended to his head, but a sort of elongated nose used like an extra limb.
    Near the mouth of the river we anchored for the night. When I reassured the brothers that the elephants would not swim out and throttle them with their trunks, they stripped and went for a swim. Astyanax darted between them, catching prawns with his hands. Some he swallowed and others he flipped on deck for Aruns to clean. I myself withdrew to the cabin.
    The couch looked irresistible. Succumbing, I fell asleep and dreamed of Circe. Redolent of myrrh and pine-needles, she leaned above me. “I have waited, my love.” Then she called my name: “Bear.” And again, “Bear.”
    I awoke with a start. Astyanax, not Circe, was calling me. Annoyed, I walked on deck. He was still in the water, with Atthis beside him.
    “You have been asleep,” he accused.
    “No,” I snapped. “Thinking.”
    “Atthis has brought you a present.”
    He took a bronze-bladed sword from her beak and lifted it into my hands. In the black niello and gold of the hilt, youths and maidens whirled over charging bulls: a Cretan scene. The old sea-kings, a thousand years ago, had explored this very coast, but the sword did not look ancient.
    “Where did she find it?” I cried.
    “In a sunken galley beyond the mouth of the river.”
    “Is the water very deep there?”
    “Less than twenty feet, she says.”
    “Ask her to show me.”
    I straddled her back and held to her dorsal fin. Her tail flashed up and down, up and down, and we foamed toward the sunken ship while Astyanax trailed in our wake. Elephants along the