Table Of ContentWARRIORS
Edited By George R. R. Martin
& Gardner Dozois
Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU
Contents
Introduction: Stories from the Spinner Rack
The King of Norway by Cecelia Holland Forever Bound by Joe
Haldeman The Triumph by Robin Hobb Clean Slate by Lawrence
Block And Ministers of Grace by Tad Williams Soldierin’ by Joe R.
Lansdale Dirae by Peter S. Beagle The Custom of the Army by
Diana Gabaldon Seven Years from Home by Naomi Novik The
Eagle and the Rabbit by Steven Saylor The Pit by James Rollins
Out of the Dark by David Weber The Girls from Avenger by
Carrie Vaughn Ancient Ways by S. M. Stirling Ninieslando by
Howard Waldrop Recidivist by Gardner Dozois My Name Is
Legion by David Morrell Defenders of the Frontier by Robert
Silverberg The Scroll by David Ball The Mystery Knight by
George R. R. Martin
Introduction
Stories from the Spinner Rack
by George R. R. Martin
There were no bookstores in Bayonne, New Jersey, when I was a
kid.
Which is not to say there was no place to buy a book. There
were plenty of places to buy books, so long as what you wanted
was a paperback. (If you wanted a hardcover, you could take
the bus into New York City.) Most of those places were what we
called “candy stores” back then, but Hershey bars and Milky
Ways and penny candy were the least of what they sold. Every
candy store was a little different from every other. Some carried
groceries and some didn’t, some had soda fountains and some
didn’t, some offered fresh baked goods in the morning and
would make you a deli sandwich all day long, some sold squirt
guns and hula hoops and those pink rubber balls we used for
our stickball games...but all of them sold newspapers,
magazines, comic books, and paperbacks.
When I was growing up in Bayonne’s projects, my local
candy store was a little place on the corner of First Street and
Kelly Parkway, across the street from the waters of the Kill Van
Kull. The “book section” was a wire spinner rack, taller than I
was, that stood right next to the comics...perfect placement for
me, once my reading had expanded beyond funny books. My
allowance was a dollar a week, and figuring out how I was going
to split that up between tencent comic books (when the price
went up to twelve cents, it really blew the hell out of my
budget), thirty-five-cent paperbacks, a candy bar or two, the
infrequent quarter malt or ice cream soda, and an occasional
game of Skee-Ball at Uncle Milty’s down the block was always
one of the more agonizing decisions of the week, and honed my
math skills to the utmost.
The comic book racks and the paperback spinner had more
in common than mere proximity. Neither one recognized the
existence of genre. In those days, the superheroes had not yet
reached the same level of dominance in comics that they
presently enjoy. Oh, we had Superman and Batman and the JLA,
of course, and later on Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four came
along to join them, but there were all sorts of other comic books
as well— war comics, crime comics, western comics, romance
comics for the girls, movie and television tie-ins, strange hybrids
like Turok, Son of Stone (Indians meet dinosaurs, and call them
“honkers”). You had Archie and Betty and Veronica and Cosmo
the Merry Martian for laughs, you had Casper the Friendly Ghost
and Baby Huey for littler kids (I was much too sophisticated for
those), you had Carl Barks drawing Donald Duck and Uncle
Scrooge. You had hot rod comics, you had comics about models
complete with cut-out clothes, and, of course, you had Classics
Illustrated, whose literary adaptations served as my first
introduction to everyone from Robert Louis Stevenson to
Herman Melville. And all these different comics were mixed
together.
The same was true of the paperbacks in the adjacent
spinner rack. There was only the one spinner, and it had only so
many pockets, so there were never more than one or two copies
of any particular title. I had been a science fiction fan since a
friend of my mother’s had given me a copy of Robert A.
Heinlein’s Have Space Suit—Will Travel one year for Christmas
(for the better part of the decade, it was the only hardcover I
owned), so I was always looking for more Heinlein, and more SF,
but with the way all the books were mixed together, the only
way to be sure of finding them was to flip through every book in
every pocket, even if it meant getting down on your knees to
check the titles in the back of the bottom level. Paperbacks
were thinner then, so each pocket might hold four or five books,
and every one was different. You’d find an Ace Double SF title
cheek-by-jowl with a mass market reprint of The Brothers
Karamazov, sandwiched in between a nurse novel and the latest
Mike Hammer yarn from Mickey Spillane. Dorothy Parker and
Dorothy Sayers shared rack space with Ralph Ellison and J. D.
Salinger. Max Brand rubbed up against Barbara Cartland.
(Barbara would have been mortified.) A. E. van Vogt, P. G.
Wodehouse, and H. P. Lovecraft were crammed in together with
F. Scott Fitzgerald. Mysteries, westerns, gothics, ghost stories,
classics of English literature, the latest contemporary “literary”
novels, and, of course, SF and fantasy and horror—you could
find it all on that spinner rack in the little candy store at First
Street and Kelly Parkway Looking back now, almost half a
century later, I can see that that wire spinner rack had a
profound impact on my later development as a writer. All writers
are readers first, and all of us write the sort of books we want to
read. I started out loving science fiction and I still love science
fiction...but inevitably, digging through those paperbacks, I
found myself intrigued by other sorts of books as well. I started
reading horror when a book with Boris Karloff on the cover
caught my attention. Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp
hooked me on fantasy, just in the time for J. R. R. Tolkien and
The Lord of the Rings. The historical epics of Dumas and
Thomas B. Costain featured sword fights too, so I soon started
reading those as well, and that led me to other epochs of history
and other authors. When I came upon Charles Dickens and Mark
Twain and Rudyard Kipling on the spinner rack, I grabbed them
up too, to read the original versions of some of my favorite
stories, and to see how they differered from the Classics
Illustrated versions. Some of the mysteries I found on the rack
had cover art so salacious that I had to smuggle them into the
apartment and read them when my mother wasn’t watching,
but I sampled those as well, and have been reading mysteries
ever since. Ian Fleming and James Bond led me into the world of
thrillers and espionage novels, and Jack Schaefer’s Shane into
westerns. (Okay, I confess, I never did get into romances or
nurse novels.) Sure, I knew the differences between a space
opera and a hard-boiled detective story and a historical
novel...but I never cared about such differences. It seemed to
me, then as now, that there were good stories and bad stories,
and that was the only distinction that truly mattered.
My views on that have not changed much in the half
century since, but the world of publishing and bookselling
certainly has. I don’t doubt that there are still some old spinner
racks out there, with all the books jumbled up together, but
these days most people buy their reading material in chain
superstores, where genre is king. SF and fantasy over here,
mystery over there, romance back of that, bestsellers up front.
No mixing and no mingling, please, keep to your own kind.
“Literature” has its own section, now that the so-called “literary
novel” has become a genre itself. Children’s books and YAs are
segregated.
It’s good for selling books, I guess. It’s convenient. Easy to
find the sort of books you like. No one has to get down on their
knees in hopes of finding Jack Vance’s Big Planet behind that
copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People.
But it’s not good for readers, I suspect, and it’s definitely
not good for writers. Books should broaden us, take us to places
we have never been and show us things we’ve never seen,
expand our horizons and our way of looking at the world.
Limiting your reading to a single genre defeats that. It limits us,
makes us smaller.
Yet genre walls are hardening. During my own career, I
have written science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and
occasionally a few hybrids that were part this and part that,
sometimes with elements of the murder mystery and the
literary novel blended in. But younger writers starting out today
are actively discouraged from doing the same by their editors
and publishers. New fantasists are told that they had best adopt
a pseudonym if they want to do a science fiction novel...and god
help them if they want to try a mystery.
It’s all in the name of selling more books, and I suppose it
does.
But I say it’s spinach, and I say to hell with it.
Bayonne may not have had any bookstores when I was
growing up, but it did have a lot of pizza parlors, and a bar pie
from Bayonne is among the best pizza anywhere. Small wonder
that pizza is my favorite food. That doesn’t mean I want to eat it
every day, and to the exclusion of every other food in the world.
Which brings me to the book you hold in your hands.
These days I am best known as a fantasy writer, but
Warriors is not a fantasy anthology...though it does have some
good fantasy in it. My co-editor, Gardner Dozois, edited a
science fiction magazine for a couple of decades, but Warriors is
not a science fiction anthology either...though it does feature
some SF stories as good as anything you’ll find in Analog or
Asimov’s. It also features a western, and some mystery stories,
a lot of fine historical fiction, some mainstream, and a couple of
pieces that I won’t even begin to try to label.Warriors is our own
spinner rack.
People have been telling stories about warriors for as long
as they have been telling stories. Since Homer first sang the
wrath of Achilles and the ancient Sumerians set down their tales
of Gilgamesh, warriors, soldiers, and fighters have fascinated
us; they are a part of every culture, every literary tradition,
every genre. All Quiet on the Western Front, From Here to
Eternity, and The Red Badge of Courage have become part of
our literary canons, taught in classrooms all around the country
and the world. Fantasy has given us such memorable warriors
as Conan the Barbarian, Elric of Melnibone, and Aragorn son of
Arathorn. Science fiction offers us glimpses of the wars and
warriors of the future, in books like Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship
Troopers, Joe W. Haldeman’s Forever War, and the space operas
of David Weber, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Walter Jon Williams.
The gunslinger of the classic western is a warrior. The mystery
genre has made an archetype of the urban warrior, be he a cop,
a hit man, a wiseguy, or one of those private eyes who walks
the mean streets of Chandler and Hammett. Women warriors,
child soldiers, warriors of the gridiron and the cricket pitch, the
Greek hoplite and Roman legionary, Viking, musketeer,
crusader, and doughboy, the GI of World War II and the grunt of
Vietnam ... all of them are warriors, and you’ll find many in
these pages.
Our contributors make up an all-star lineup of award-
winning and bestselling writers, representing a dozen different
publishers and as many genres. We asked each of them for the
same thing—a story about a warrior. Some chose to write in the
genre for which they’re best known. Some decided to try
something different. You will find warriors of every shape, size,
and color in these pages, warriors from every epoch of human
history, from yesterday and today and tomorrow, and worlds
that never were. Some of the stories will make you sad, some
will make you laugh, many will keep you on the edge of your
seat.
But you won’t know which until you’ve read them, for
Gardner and I, in the tradition of that old wire spinner rack, have
mixed them all up. There’s no science fiction section here, no
shelves reserved just for historical novels, no romance rack, no
walls or labels of any sort. Just stories. Some are by your
favorite writers, we hope; others, by writers you may never
have heard of (yet). It’s our hope that by the time you finish this
book, a few of the latter may have become the former.
So spin the rack and turn the page. We have some stories
to tell you.
<<Contents>>
Cecelia Holland
Cecelia Holland is one of the world’s most highly acclaimed and
respected historical novelists, ranked by many alongside other
giants in that field, such as Mary Renault and Larry McMurtry.
Over the span of her thirty-year career, she’s written almost
thirty historical novels, including The Firedrake, Rakossy, Two
Ravens, Ghost on the Steppe, The Death of Attila, The King’s
Road, Pillar of the Sky, The Lords of Vaumartin, Pacific Street,
The Sea Beggars, The Earl, The Kings in Winter, The Belt of
Gold, and more than a dozen others. She also wrote the well-
known science fiction novel Floating Worlds, which was
nominated for a Locus Award in 1975, and of late has been
working on a series of fantasy novels, including The Soul Thief,
Witches’ Kitchen, The Serpent Dreamer, and Varanger, the most
recent volume in the Soul Thief series. The High City, a historical
novel set in the Byzantine Empire, was published in 2009.
In the violent and bloody story that follows, she takes us
back to the days of the Vikings and sweeps us along with a
swift-moving raiding party (hope you know how to row!) who
find the stakes for that particular raid set a little higher than
they had bargained for....
The King of Norway
I
Conn Corbansson had fought for Sweyn Tjugas when Sweyn was
just an outlaw rebelling against his father, King Harald
Bluetooth, and the prince had promised him a war with England
