by Kage Baker
“That’s right!” sobs Robert.
“With the whole eternal world to explore, and a million other ways to be happy—still, all you want is to pay them back,” says Porfirio, watching him carefully.
“Yeah!” cries Robert, panting. He wipes his nose on his dirty sleeve. He looks up again, sharply. “I mean—I mean—”
“See? Stupid. And you’re not a good boy, Bobby,” says Porfirio gently. “You’re a goddamn monster. You’re trying to blow up a whole world full of innocent people. You know what should happen, now? Your dad ought to come walking up that hill, madder than hell, and punish you.”
Robert looks down the hillside.
“But he can’t, ever again,” he says. He sounds tired.
Porfirio has already moved, and before the last weary syllable is out of his mouth Robert feels the scorpion-sting in his arm.
He whirls around, but Porfirio has already retreated, withdrawn up the hillside. He stands before the mural, and the painted outfielder smiles over his shoulder. Robert clutches his arm, beginning to cry afresh.
“No fair,” he protests. But he knows it’s more than fair. It is even a relief.
He falls to his knees, whimpering at the heat of the old road’s surface. He crawls to the side and collapses in the yellow summer grass.
“Will I have to go to the future now?” Robert asks piteously.
“No, son. No future,” Porfirio replies.
Robert nods and closes his eyes. He could sink through the rotating earth if he tried, escape once again into 1951; instead he floats away from time itself, into the back of his father’s hand.
Porfirio walks down the hill toward him. As he does so, an all-terrain vehicle comes barreling up the old road, mowing down thistles in its path.
It shudders to a halt and Clete leaps out, leaving the door open in his headlong rush up the hill. He is not wearing the same suit he wore when last seen by Porfirio.
“You stinking son of a bitch defective,” he roars, and aims a kick at Robert’s head. Porfirio grabs his arm.
“Take it easy,” he says.
“He sent me back six hundred thousand years! Do you know how long I had to wait before the Company even opened a damn transport depot?” says Clete, and looking at his smooth ageless face Porfirio can see that ages have passed over it. Clete now has permanently furious eyes. Their glare bores into Porfirio like acid. No convenience stores in 598,000 bc, huh? Porfirio thinks to himself.
“You knew he was going to do this to me, didn’t you?” demands Clete.
“No,” says Porfirio. “All I was told was, there’d be complications to the arrest. And you should have known better than to rush the guy.”
“You got that right,” says Clete, shrugging off his hand. “So why don’t you do the honors?”
He goes stalking back to his transport, and hauls a body bag from the back seat. Porfirio sighs. He reaches into his coat and withdraws what looks like a screwdriver handle. When he thumbs a button on its side, however, a half-circle of blue light forms at one end. He tests it with a random slice through a thistle, which falls over at once. He leans down and scans Robert Ross carefully, because he wants to be certain he is unconscious.
“I’m sorry,” he murmurs.
Working with the swiftness of long practice, he does his job. Clete returns, body bag under his arm, watching with grim satisfaction. Hank Bauer is still smiling down from the mural.
When the disassembly is finished, Porfirio loads the body bag into the car and climbs in beside it. Clete gets behind the wheel and backs carefully down the road. Bobby Ross may not be able to die, but he is finally on his way to eternal rest.
The Volkswagen sits there rusting for a month before it is stolen.
The blood remains on the old road for four months, before autumn rains wash it away, but they do wash it away. By the next summer the yellow grass is high, and the road as white as innocence once more.
Leaving His Cares Behind
The young man opened his eyes. Bright day affronted them. He groaned and rolled over, pulling his pillow about his ears.
After thirty seconds of listening to his brain pound more loudly than his heart, he rolled over again and stared at his comfortless world.
It shouldn’t have been comfortless. It had originally been a bijou furnished residence, suitable for a wealthy young person-about-town. That had been when one could see the floor, however. Or the sink. Or the tabletops. Or, indeed, anything but the chilly wasteland of scattered clothing, empty bottles and unwashed dishes.
He regarded all this squalor with mild outrage, as though it belonged to someone else, and crawled from the strangling funk of his sheets. Standing up was a mistake; the top of his head blew off and hit the ceiling. A suitable place to vomit was abruptly a primary concern.
The kitchen? No; no room in the sink. Bathroom? Too far away. He lurched to the balcony doors, flung them wide and leaned out. A delicate peach soufflé, a bowl of oyster broth, assorted brightly colored trifles that did not yield their identities to memory and two bottles of sparkling wine spattered into the garden below.
Limp as a rag he clung to the rail, retching and spitting, shivering in his nakedness. Amused comment from somewhere roused him; he lifted his eyes and saw that half of Deliantiba (or at least the early-morning tradesmen making their way along Silver Boulevard) had watched his performance. He glared at them. Spitting out the last of the night before, he stood straight, turned his affronted back and went inside, slamming the balcony doors behind him.
With some effort, he located his dressing gown (finest velvet brocade, embroidered with gold thread) and matching slippers. The runner answered his summoning bell sooner than he had expected and her thunder at his door brought on more throbbing in his temples. He opened to see the older one, not the young one who was so smitten with him, and cursed his luck.
“Kretia, isn’t it?” he said, smiling nonetheless. “You look lovely this morning! Now, I’d like a carafe of mint tea, a plate of crisp wafers and one green apple, sliced thin. Off you go, and if you’re back within ten minutes you’ll have a gratuity of your very own!”
She just looked at him, hard-eyed. “Certainly, sir,” she replied. “Will that be paid for in advance, sir?”
“There goes your treat,” he muttered, but swept a handful of assorted small coins from the nearest flat surface and handed them through the doorway. “That should be enough. Kindly hurry; I’m not a well man.”
He had no clean clothing, but while poking through the drifts of slightly less foul linen he found a pair of red silk underpants he was fairly certain did not belong to him, and pulling them on cheered him up a great deal. By the time he had breakfasted and strolled out to meet the new day, Lord Ermenwyr was nearly himself again, and certainly capable of grappling with the question of how he was going to pay his rent for another month.
And grappling was required.
The gentleman at Firebeater’s Savings and Loan was courteous, but implacable: no further advances on my lord’s quarterly allotment were to be paid, on direct order of my lord’s father. Charm would not persuade him; neither would veiled threats. Finally the stop payment order itself was produced, with its impressive and somewhat frightening seal of black wax. Defeated, Lord Ermenwyr slunk out into the sunshine and stamped his foot at a pigeon that was unwise enough to cross his path. It just stared at him.
He strode away, hands clasped under his coattails, thinking very hard. By long-accustomed habit his legs bore him to a certain pleasant villa on Goldwire Avenue, and when he realized where he was, he smiled and rang at the gate. A laconic porter admitted him to Lady Seelice’s garden. An anxious-looking maidservant admitted him to Lady Seelice’s house. He found his own way to Lady Seelice’s boudoir.
Lady Seelice was sitting up in bed, going over the books of her shipping company, and she had a grim set to her mouth. Vain for him to offer to distract her with light conversation; vain for him to offer to massage her neck, or b
rush her hair. He perched on the foot of her bed, looking as winsome as he could, and made certain suggestions. She declined them in an absent-minded sort of way.
He helped himself to sugared comfits from the exquisite little porcelain jar on her bedside table, and ate them quite amusingly, but she did not laugh. He pretended to play her corset like an accordion, but she did not laugh at that either. He fastened her brassiere on his head and crawled around the room on his hands and knees meowing like a kitten, and when she took absolutely no notice of that, he stood up and asked her outright if she’d loan him a hundred crowns.
She told him to get out, so he did.
As he was stamping downstairs, fuming, the anxious maidservant drifted into his path.
“Oh, dear, was she cross with you?” she inquired.
“Your mistress is in a vile mood,” said Lord Ermenwyr resentfully, and he pulled her close and kissed her very hard. She leaned into his embrace, making soft noises, stroking his hair. When they came up for air at last, she looked into his eyes.
“She’s been in a vile mood these three days. Something’s wrong with her stupid old investments.”
“Well, if she’s not nicer soon, she’ll find that her nimble little goat has capered off to greener pastures,” said Lord Ermenwyr, pressing his face into the maidservant’s bosom. He began to untie the cord of her bodice with his teeth.
“I’ve been thinking, darling,” said the maidservant slowly, “that perhaps it’s time we told her the truth about…you know…us.”
Unseen under her chin, the lordling grimaced in dismay. He spat out a knot and straightened up at once.
“Well! Yes. Perhaps.” He coughed, and looked suddenly pale. “On the other hand, there is the danger—” He coughed again, groped hurriedly for a silk handkerchief and held it to his lips. “My condition is so, ah, tentative. If we were to tell of our forbidden love—and then I were to collapse unexpectedly and die, which I might at any moment, how could I rest in my grave knowing that your mistress had turned you out in the street?”
“I suppose you’re right,” sighed the maidservant, watching as he doubled over in a fit of coughing. “Do you want a glass of wine or anything?”
“No, my darling—” Wheezing, Lord Ermenwyr turned and made his unsteady way to the door. “I think—I think I’d best pay a call on my personal physician. Adieu.”
Staggering, choking, he exited, and continued in that wise until he was well out of sight at the end of the avenue, at which time he stood straight and walked on. A few paces later the sugared comfits made a most unwelcome return, and though he was able to lean quickly over a low wall, he looked up directly into the eyes of someone’s outraged gardener.
Running three more blocks did not improve matters much. He collapsed on a bench in a small public park and fumed, considering his situation.
“I’m fed up with this life,” he told a statue of some Deliantiban civic leader. “Independence is all very well, but perhaps…”
He mulled over the squalor, the inadequacy, the creditors, the wretched complications with which he had hourly to deal. He compared it with his former accustomed comforts, in a warm and loving home where he was accorded all the consideration his birth and rank merited. Within five minutes, having given due thought to all arguments pro and con, he rose briskly to his feet and set off in the direction of Silver Boulevard.
Ready cash was obtained by pawning one of the presents Lady Seelice had given him (amethysts were not really his color, after all). He dined pleasantly at his favorite restaurant that evening. When three large gentlemen asked at the door whether or not Lord Ermenwyr had a moment to speak with them, however, he was obliged to exit through a side door and across a roof.
Arriving home shortly after midnight, he loaded all his unwashed finery into his trunks, lowered the trunks from his window with a knotted sheet, himself exited in like manner, and dragged the trunks a quarter-mile to the caravan depot. He spent the rest of the night there, dozing fitfully in a corner, and by dawn was convinced he’d caught his death of cold.
But when his trunks were loaded into the baggage cart, when he had taken his paid seat amongst the other passengers, when the caravan master had mounted into the lead cart and the runner signaled their departure with a blast on her brazen trumpet—then Lord Ermenwyr was comforted, and allowed himself to sneer at Deliantiba and all his difficulties there as it, and they, fell rapidly behind him.
***
The caravan master drew a deep breath, deciding to be patient.
“Young man, your friends must have been having a joke at your expense,” he said. “There aren’t any country estates around here. We’re in the bloody Greenlands. Nobody’s up here but bandits, and demons and wild beasts.”
“No need to be alarmed on my behalf, good fellow,” the young man assured him. “There’ll be bearers along to meet me in half an hour. That’s their cart-track right there, see?”
The caravan master peered at what might have been a rabbit’s trail winding down to the honest paved road. He followed it up with his eyes until it became lost in the immensity of the forests. He looked higher still, at the black mountain towering beyond, and shuddered. He knew what lay up there. It wasn’t something he told his paying passengers about, because if he were ever to do so, no amount of bargain fares could tempt them to take this particular shortcut through the wilderness.
“Look,” he said, “I’ll be honest with you. If I let you off here, the next thing anyone will hear of you is a note demanding your ransom. If the gods are inclined to be merciful! There’s a Red House station three days on. Ride with us that far, at least. You can send a message to your friends from there.”
“I tell you this is my stop, Caravan Master,” said the young man, in such a snide tone the caravan master thought: To hell with him.
“Offload his trunks, then!” he ordered the keymen, and marched off to the lead cart and resumed his seat. As the caravan pulled away, the other passengers looked back, wondering at the young man who sat down on his luggage with an air of unconcern and pulled out a jade smoking-tube, packing it with fragrant weed.
“I hope his parents have other sons,” murmured a traveling salesman. Something howled in the depths of the forest, and he looked fearfully over his shoulder. In doing so, he missed seeing the young man lighting up his smoke with a green fireball. When he looked back, a bend in the road had already hidden the incautious youth.
Lord Ermenwyr, in the meanwhile, sucked in a double lungful of medicinal smoke and sighed in contentment. He leaned back, and blew a smoke ring.
“That’s my unpaid rent and cleaning fee,” he said to himself, watching it dissipate and wobble away. He sucked smoke and blew another.
“That’s my little misunderstanding with Brasshandle the moneylender,” he said, as it too faded into the pure air. Giggling to himself, he drew in a deep, deep store of smoke and blew three rings in close formation.
“Your hearts, ladies! All of you. Byebye now! You’ll find another toy to amuse yourselves, I don’t doubt. All my troubles are magically wafting away—oh, wait, I should blow one for that stupid business with the public fountain—”
When he heard the twig snap, however, he sat up and gazed into the darkness of the forest.
They were coming for him through the trees, and they were very large. Some were furred and some were scaled, some had great fanged pitilessly grinning mouths, some had eyes red as a dying campfire just before the night closes in. Some bore spiked weapons. Some bore treebough clubs. They shared no single characteristic of feature or flesh, save that they wore, all, livery black as ink.
“It’s about time you got here,” said Lord Ermenwyr. Rising to his feet, he let fall the glamour that disguised his true form.
“Master!” cried some of that dread host, and “Little Master!” cried others,
and they abased themselves before him.
“Yes, yes, I’m glad to see you too,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “Take special ca
re with my trunks, now. I’ll have no end of trouble getting them to close again, if they’re dropped and burst open.”
“My little lord, you look pale,” said the foremost creature, doffing his spiked helmet respectfully. “Have you been ill again? Shall we carry you?”
“I haven’t been well, no,” the lordling admitted. “Perhaps you ought.”
The leader knelt immediately, and Lord Ermenwyr hopped up on his shoulder and clung as he stood, looking about with satisfaction from the considerable height.
“Home!” he ordered, and that uncouth legion bore him, and his trunks, and his unwashed linen, swiftly and with chants of praise to the great black gate of his father’s house.
***
The Lord Ermenwyr was awakened next morning by an apologetic murmur, as one of the maidservants slipped from his bed. He acknowledged her departure with a sleepy grunt and a wave of his hand, and rolled over to luxuriate in dreams once more. Nothing disturbed his repose further until the black and purple curtains of his bed were drawn open, reverently, and he heard a sweet chime that meant his breakfast had just arrived on a tray.
“Tea and toast, little Master,” someone growled gently. “The toast crisp, just as you like it, and a pot of hyacinth jam, and Hrekseka the Appalling remembered you like that shrimp-egg relish, so here’s a puff pastry filled with it for a savory. Have we forgotten anything? Would you like the juice of blood oranges, perhaps?”
The lordling opened his eyes and smiled wide, stretched lazily.
“Yes, thank you, Krasp,” he said, and the steward—who resembled nothing so much as an elderly werewolf stuck in mid-transformation—bowed and looked sidelong at an attendant, who ran at once to fetch a pitcher of juice. He meanwhile set about arranging Lord Ermenwyr’s tray on his lap, opening out the black linen napery and tucking it into the lace collar of the lordling’s nightshirt, and pouring the tea.
“And may I say, Master, on behalf of the staff, how pleased we are to see you safely returned?” said Krasp, stepping back and turning his attention to laying out a suit of black velvet.