The Law of Man

The Law of Man

Michelle Sagara

Rosdan Press

Copyright © 1997, 2003 by Michelle Sagara

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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Contents

Introduction

The Law of Man

About the Author

Also by Michelle West

Also by Michelle Sagara

Other Short Stories

Introduction

This was one of the few short stories that started life without an anthology or an editor to give it a home—and when I say started, I mean that; I hadn’t finished it. Time to write was still a desperately prized thing, given small child, and I had novel deadlines. I had started it, set it aside, and when I was asked for a story for Elf Fantastic, I brought it out again.

I had meant it to be something other than it ended up being, because I was thinking — at the time — about the coming of new religions into an older world. But stories grow and change; they have an organic sense of life that one denies — or at least that I deny — at some peril to the story itself.

Without a specific editorial request, I really hadn’t considered market, or how to market, or where to send it, either. One of the things that the anthology invitations gave me was a clear home for the stories, a mandate to write them that also didn’t make me feel like garbage because I wasn’t using scant writing time on the novels for which I had contracts.

The Law of Man

It is twilight; the light of day is fading and the night’s fall is imminent. With the passing of the day, many things change; the shadows hide much from eyes that are not meant for the dark. Mortal eyes.

But our eyes see well the nuance and the subtlety.

There are circles beneath my feet, ill-travelled these many years, but there nonetheless for those with eyes to see them. In such circles, we once gathered our mortals, and took with them an evening’s pleasure, be they unwary enough to heed the strains of our music. In such a circle, we will gather again; my kin are waiting my return. But these circles, these circles we will not dance in again while I live.

And I will live, I fear, forever.

It is cool; the coming evening will rim the forest trees in frost, will curl the fallen leaves with a white, hoary edge that will sharpen and make crisp their tiny deaths.

Leaves, like mortals, die so quickly.

And what is death to one of our kind?

In the dawn of our time we gathered our mortals with impunity undreamed of now. Where in the spring and high summer we danced in glades such as these, we walk now in winter, for in winter, there are few indeed of the priests whose travels have almost destroyed these lands.

Ah.