Whiskey and Water by Elizabeth Bear

himself
up as if he weighed far more than his long, spindly body indicated. The poet
thrust out his hand; Bunyip accepted, and for a moment the poet felt him otherwise, the long stick and twig hand resolving into a damp clawed flipper. The poet
craned his head back as a shadow cooled his face. It wasn't a tall
woolly-haired man in a black broad-brimmed hat that looked back at him.
    The head that hung over him was jowled
like a mastiff and whiskered like a seal, flews clinging to projecting walrus
tusks. Black velvet skin, soft as a horse's muzzle, drooped around eyes full of
glaring planes of light like black opals. The neck was thick and conical—a sea
lion's neck, a bull's—blurring into shoulders like a wall of meat. More black
crushed velvet covered the massive muscles, and behind them the ponderous body
tapered to a scaled and armored tail, the flukes arched over his back. Bunyip braced
itself on one burly leg, which ended in a flippered claw, and extended the
other delicately, a cat poking dust motes in a sunbeam.
    The poet had shaken the hands of demons
and queens and Ben Jon-son. He managed not to jump back with a yelp, but it was
a very near thing.
    A pleasure," the human said, as
Bunyip shifted his weight onto his tail and extricated his hand from the human's
grasp without accidentally crushing him to death.
    He smelled delicious.
    With that momentary brush of fingers,
Bunyip brought them into the Dream. The human surprised him again; they usually
panicked, trembled, curled into themselves when confronted with the richness
of chipped, shifting colors and lights. This human glanced around once,
quickly, like a startled bird, and then set his shoulders and crossed his arms
over his chest, breathing calmly. He had gone wide-eyed over Bunyip's revealed
aspect, but mastered it in a moment, and he didn't seem overly perturbed by the
Kelpie's Dreaming shape, the wet-maned stallion pied white and black as a
magpie.
    He was shaman-stuff, then, and initiated.
And perhaps not for eating, no matter how delicious he smelled. Bunyip huffed
through bean-shaped nostrils, hiding his annoyance.
    The poet stared at the monster in
preference to the landscape. It could have been a riverbank in Faerie, mud
redolent and primeval underfoot and ferns and mosses rich along the bank.
Concentrating on the beast kept the jittering surge of his heart and the
shaking of his hands from showing in his voice.
    The water itself was cloudy green and as
full of light as jade. The whole place had a sense of hyperreality to it, an
oil-painting depth and saturation of color, but if the poet looked too closely,
it resolved itself into facets and flickers, pointillist dots. Unreal, fractal,
unsettling.
    Much better to look at the Bunyip, who was
preparing to speak again, with peculiarly fair words to ease past those tusks
and the flesh-ripping teeth revealed when he opened his mouth.
    "Also," Bunyip said, curling his
flukes under him, "I am never out of the Dreaming, because the Dreaming is
everywhere."
    Whiskey snorted and shook out his mane.
Salt water spattered the poet's back and Bunyip's face. "Am I here to
fence with you, Bunyip?"
    Bunyip shifted his weight, slithering, his
bulk leaving a broad channel pressed in the malleable bank. When he moved, it
was fast as a mongoose, a heave and a twist that sent his meaty shoulder
barreling into Whiskey's, his thick neck thrust over Whiskey's back, a
resounding body slam that tumbled the stallion over in the mud and sent the man
sprawling, diving out of the way. Bunyip thumped across Whiskey's barrel and
lay there, his tusks lowered like daggers to press Whiskey's throttle. Pale
silken hide dented under ivory scimitars, as the water-horse thrashed and then
froze, forehooves pressing, back arched like a rabbit straining at a snare.
    "You're here to answer to me,"
Bunyip said. "Your demesne is un-managed, your subjects unruled. And I see
you without strength, and I hear you have been bound. But there is no