A companion volume to Year's Best SF, this fifth anthology of outstanding fantasy tales features contributions by such acclaimed fantasy authors as Kage Baker, Peter S. Beagle, Neil Gaiman, Patricia A. McKillip, Tim S. Powers, and Gene Wolfe, in a collection of the best short fantasy fiction of the year. Original.
Year's Best Fantasy 5
By David Hartwell
HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2005
David Hartwell
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0060776056
The Dragons of Summer Gulch
Robert Reed
A hard winter can lift rocks as well as old bones, shoving all
that is loose up through the most stubborn earth. Then
snowmelt and flash floods will sweep across the ground,
wiping away the gravel and clay. And later, when a man
with good vision and exceptional luck rides past, all of the
world might suddenly change.
"Would you look at that," the man said to himself in a
firm, deep voice. "A claw, isn't it? From a mature dragon,
isn't it? Good Lord, Mr. Barrow. And there's two more
claws set beside that treasure!"
Barrow was a giant fellow with a narrow face and a
heavy cap of black hair that grew from his scalp and the
back of his neck and between the blades of his strong shoulders.
Born on one of the Northern Isles, he had left his
homeland as a young man to escape one war, coming to this
new country just in time to be thrown into a massive and
prolonged civil conflict. Ten thousand miseries had abused
him over the next years. But he survived the fighting, and
upon his discharge from the Army of the Center, a grateful
nation had given him both his citizenship and a bonus of
gold coins. Barrow purchased a one-way ticket on the
Western railroad, aiming to find his fortune in the wilderness.
His journey ended in one of the new prairie towns—a
place famous for hyrax herds and dragon bones. There he
had purchased a pair of quality camels, ample supplies for
six months of solitude, and with shovels enough to move a
hillside, he had set out into the washlands.
Sliding off the lead camel, he said, "Hold."
The beast gave a low snort, adjusting its hooves to find
the most comfortable pose.
Barrow knelt, carefully touching the dragon's middle claw. Ancient as this artifact was, he knew from painful experience
that even the most weathered claw was sharp
enough to slash. Just as the fossil teeth could puncture the
thickest leather gloves, and the edges of the great scales
were nastier than any saw blade sharpened on the hardest
whetstone.
The claw was a vivid deep purple color—a sure sign of
good preservation. With his favorite little pick, Barrow
worked loose the mudstone beneath it, exposing its full
length and the place where it joined into the front paw. He
wasn't an educated man, but Barrow knew his trade: this
had been a flying dragon, one of the monsters who once patrolled
the skies above a vanished seacoast. The giant paw
was meant for gripping. Presumably the dragons used their
four feet much as a coon-rascal does, holding their prey and
for other simple manipulations. These finger claws were always
valuable, but the thick thumb claw—the Claw of
God—would be worth even more to buyers. As night fell,
Barrow dug by the smoky light of a little fire, picking away
at the mudstone until the paw was revealed—a palm-down
hand large enough to stand upon and, after ages of being entombed,
still displaying the dull red color made by the interlocking
scales.
The man didn't sleep ten blinks. Then with first light he
followed a hunch, walking half a dozen long strides up the
gully and thrusting a shovel into what looked like a mound
of ordinary clay.
The shovel was good steel, but a dull thunk announced
that something beneath was harder by a long ways.
Barrow used the shovel and a big pickax, working fast
and sloppy, investing the morning to uncover a long piece
of the dragon's back—several daggerlike spines rising from
perhaps thirty big plates of ruddy armor.
Exhaustion forced him to take a break, eating his fill and
drinking the last of his water. Then, because they were hungry
and a little thirsty, he led both of his loyal camels down
the gully, finding a flat plain where sagebrush grew and
seepage too foul for a man to drink stood in a shallow alkaline
pond.
The happy camels drank and grazed, wandering as far as
their long leashes allowed.
Barrow returned to his treasure. Twice he dug into fresh
ground, and twice he guessed wrong, finding nothing. The
monster's head was almost surely missing. Heads almost always
were. But he tried a third time, and his luck held. Not
only was the skull entombed along with the rest of the carcass,
it was still attached to the body, the long muscular
neck having twisted hard to the left as the creature passed
from the living.
It had been a quick death, he was certain.
There were larger specimens, but the head was magnifi-
cent. What Barrow could see was as long as he was tall, narrow
and elegant, a little reminiscent of a pelican's head, but
prettier, the giant mouth bristling with a forest of teeth,
each tooth bigger than his thumb. The giant dragon eyes
had vanished, but the large sockets remained, filled with
mudstone and aimed forward like a hawk's eyes. And behind
the eyes lay a braincase several times bigger than any
man's.
"How did you die?" he asked his new friend.
Back in town, an educated fellow had explained to Barrow
what science knew today and what it was guessing.
Sometimes the dragons had been buried in mud, on land or
underwater, and the mud protected the corpse from its hungry
cousins and gnawing rats. If there were no oxygen, then
there couldn't be any rot. And that was the best of circumstances.
Without rot, and buried inside a stable deep grave,
an entire dragon could be kept intact, waiting for the
blessed man to ride by on his happy camel.
Barrow was thirsty enough to moan, but he couldn't afford
to stop now ...
Continues...
Excerpted from Year's Best Fantasy 5
by David Hartwell
Copyright © 2005 by David Hartwell.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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