Tigerheart

by Peter David

From the darkness, Princess Picca said in irritation, “Anything Gwenny-lady do know?”

  “I know not to punch an Indian princess in the mouth for getting snippy. Especially when it’s pitch-black and she could never prove it was me.” Then she paused and added, “Then again, this is the Anyplace, and memory can sometimes be an inconsistent thing. So let’s hope I don’t forget that as well.”

  Princess Picca wisely said nothing more on the subject.

  Chapter 15

  The Boy Helpless

  The Boy saw the gargantuan wave crashing down upon him, but that didn’t deter him from his endeavors to save the Piccas and his friends. He pushed against the boulders that he knew would trigger a rockslide, but they seemed disinclined to move. He threw all his strength into it, and more besides, and the air hissed sharply between his pearly teeth as he pushed and prodded and cajoled and begged the huge stones to cooperate with him. Just when it seemed hopeless, he felt a small amount of give that quickly escalated into a good deal of give. He let out a triumphant howl, like that of a wolf, as the rocks tumbled from their perch and rolled violently down the side of the mountain. Within seconds, they were covering the entrances to the caves that lay at the bottom.

  So pleased with himself was The Boy that he yanked out his sword and shouted defiantly at the oncoming tidal wave, “I’m not afraid! Have at thee!”

  Now there is much to be said for confidence and determination in the face of an opponent. But there is also something to be said for overconfidence, none of it especially flattering. And determination is, again, quite laudable in its proper place. There is undeniably, though, a fine line between determination and ill-advised pigheadedness, and we would be dishonest if we did not say that The Boy’s behavior tilted rather toward the latter.

  Let us focus ever so briefly on the positive aspects of the encounter: The Boy managed to hold on to his sword. This was rather miraculous, and we would be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge it with a brief “Well done, you.”

  That, tragically, covers the entirety of the positive aspects, leaving us with a considerable debacle for the balance. Certainly it was one of the low points of The Boy’s otherwise remarkable and generally successful career.

  The wave slammed into The Boy, sending him tumbling end over end. Ludicrously, he actually made several attempts to stab it, which turned out just about as well as you might expect. The Boy thrashed about, completely losing track of up and down. He tried to fly away from it, but there was far too much water all around him. He was trapped inside a vast wall of water, unable to escape. He shouted in defiance, which turned out to be another rather bad idea, since it simply resulted in his swallowing water.

  He flipped around out of control, unable to hear anything except the flowing and churning of the water itself. For one such as The Boy, who relished being in thorough control of everything, this was a torture vicious enough to have been spit up from the bowels of perdition.

  And the biggest problem of all was a fairly simple one: The Boy couldn’t swim. That’s not to say that if he’d possessed the skills of even an Olympic-caliber swimmer, things might have gone differently. Chances are they wouldn’t have. Nevertheless, he couldn’t swim, and he knew he couldn’t swim, and that knowledge certainly didn’t do much for his confidence level.

  Like an insect endeavoring to outmuscle a spider’s web, The Boy fought to pull himself loose from his imprisonment. He was busy choking on water and so drawing a breath wasn’t really an option. Finally a surprising notion crossed his mind: He might die. Of all the ways he might have died, he would never, ever have envisioned this one.

  They say that one faces impending death through a series of regularized steps: shock, disbelief, anger, bargaining, and ultimately acceptance. Since The Boy tended to be a bit mercurial, not to mention precocious, he went straight to acceptance. Not that he had a death wish, mind you. It’s simply that death tended to hold a morbid fascination for him. Nor did he regard death as the life-ending experience that you and I would. Instead, when it came to the subject of demises, The Boy’s attitude was very much along the lines of “If I die, I wonder what will happen next.”

  The Boy had just managed to reach that point of “I wonder—” when death was snatched from him unceremoniously. With no warning, The Boy was spit out of the wall of water. He tried to regain his equilibrium, to fly, but things were happening too quickly. Unable to control his forward motion, The Boy spiraled through the air, the Anyplace whirling around him. Then he felt a violent crashing, and something tearing up his skin. He was barely conscious enough to be aware that he was plummeting through the tops of trees, hurtling toward the ground, and then blackness overcame him.

  Imagine, if you will, the pirates’ delight when they found him.

  The Skull n’ Bones, which we have left unattended for long enough in our narrative, had indeed found safety on the leeward side of the island. This isn’t to say that the ship didn’t feel the effects of the storm that Captain Slash had been instrumental in unleashing. The seas were so choppy that, although the veteran pirates handled themselves with aplomb, the Bully Boys were leaning over the edge of the ship and heave-hoing their lunches into the water.

  Nor were they immune to the vast tidal wave that had slammed into the island. Although the majority of the wave’s fury was expended upon the upper shores, there was still enough to cascade down upon the pirate vessel, flood the decks, and come perilously close to sinking the ship. This caused a good deal of grumbling among the crew even as they worked like fiends to bail out all the water, since they well knew that Captain Slash was the one responsible for the debacle in the first place.

  But Slash was a wise and wily individual, and she knew precisely what to tell the crew to buoy their spirits: that they would make an immediate excursion onto the island as soon as the storm subsided, to see what newly unearthed treasure they could find and what prisoners they could take.

  A landing party consisting of Captain Slash and a half dozen of her more stout swarthies rowed to the Anyplace and made their way through the forest, finding whatever they could find.

  The sky was still dark although the fearsome rains had let up, and the ground was moist and spongy beneath their boots. Simon the Dancer had taken point, vaulting over puddles and pointing out newly made sinkholes so the pirates could make sure to walk around them. Slash’s gaze darted here and there, looking for some sign of potential booty. She had experienced tempest-tossed lands where various valuables had been washed away from their owners to wind up in the mud, ripe for the picking.

  It was Suleyman who spotted the unexpectedly valuable treasure first. We should not be surprised that Suleyman was the one who did it. Suleyman was very aware of the evil and viciousness of his various deeds, and was perpetually glancing skyward to make sure that the gods had not tired of his evil and decided to dispatch him with a thunderbolt from on high. So Suleyman, in one of his standard looks heavenward, spotted a most astounding sight. “Captain,” he whispered, and even whispering his voice came out in a low rumble. “Look yonder.”

  She followed where he was pointing and gasped in delight. There, with arms dangling limply and body swaying in the nighttime breeze, was the unmoving body of The Boy. His torso was entirely visible; from the waist down (or should we say “upside down”) he was snarled in branches and vines. There were scratches over his face and upper arms. His eyes were closed, and a small trail of spittle was trickling from the edge of his mouth.

  They had brought heavy netting to drag things along in. Squealing with delight, Captain Slash ordered the netting to be brought forward. Agha Bey, at his captain’s behest, clambered up into the trees and cut The Boy down. The Boy tumbled toward the ground and, as he did so, the sudden motion awoke him. But he didn’t react fast enough to go airborne, and seconds later the pirates had him completely entangled in the net. He lay there, arms pinned to his side, the weight of the net preventing him from lifting off.

  Captain Slash strode forwa
rd, grinning. “Well, well, well…The Boy. Quite an honor, if I do say so myself.”

  “You do indeed say so yourself,” he tossed back carelessly.

  She swung one booted foot fiercely and connected with The Boy’s side. He groaned in pain and tried to roll away, but didn’t get very far.

  “You were a foolish young man,” she said. She was strolling around him, reveling in her power over him, her hands draped behind her back. “All you had to do was remain exactly as you were, living in my brother’s shadow. Had you done so, you would still be in command of the most fearsome pirate ship afloat. My brother was more than content to be the puppeteer. But thanks to your foolish efforts, the two of you are separated when you were so effective together.” She eyed him slyly for a moment. “I don’t suppose you’d consider returning to the previous arrangement. If you reattach to my brother, then all will be as it was before. This”—and she gestured toward him, lying there helplessly—“would slowly fade away and be forgotten. Instead of memories of humiliation, you would know nothing but success and triumph.”

  “I’m no one’s puppet,” he said defiantly.

  This drew chuckles from the pirates. Captain Slash simply shook her head, as if this were the saddest thing he could have said.

  “In that case, you’ll be no one’s anything. A pity, too. I wonder how your beloved pixie will react when we bring her your head as a trophy.”

  Sadly (for such is the transitory nature of memory in the Anyplace) The Boy actually had to pause and think what Slash could possibly be referring to. But then it came to him in a lightning flash of recollection. “Fiddlefix!” he said, new energy flooding through him. “You have her?”

  “Safe and secure in my quarters, under lock and key,” said Captain Slash smugly.

  “Don’t worry, Fiddle!” he said as if the pixie could possibly hear him. “I’ll save you!”

  “You,” the pirate captain reminded him, “cannot even save yourself. And if you think I’m going to allow you to live so that eventually you might trick your way into freedom and unseat me…well, you are sadly mistaken. Sadly for you, that is. For us, we are the gladder for it.” And she strode toward him, bringing her sword arm back, preparing to thrust it forward squarely into The Boy’s chest.

  The Boy did not flinch. “You wouldn’t dare,” he said defiantly, and his show of bravado caught her by surprise.

  “I wouldn’t?” she said, lowering her sword, one slim eyebrow arched. “And why wouldn’t I, pray tell?”

  “What do you think would happen to the Anyplace without me?” The Boy said. “You, your ship, your dreams…they’d all dissolve. You’d be nothing without me. I am the be-all and end all of this land. It exists because I want it to exist. It needs me far more than I need it. When I’m gone, everything comes to a stop, hanging there in a haze of nothingness until I return. Nothing happens here that I don’t allow to happen or want to happen. Were I to go, the Anyplace would go with me. And where would you be then?”

  “Why, I imagine I’d be right here,” Captain Slash said, not the least bit impressed by The Boy’s outburst, “chuckling over your dead body and watching with laughter while creatures large and small come scurrying out of hiding to sup on you.” She shook her head and actually sounded pitying. “Ohhhh, my dear, dear Boy. How tragically typical. Every young lad foolishly believes the sun rises and sets upon him, or that he is the axis upon which the world turns. But I thought you were exempt from such delusion because it’s a point of view invariably fostered by too-attentive mothers. You have no mother, and so I would have believed you to be devoid of the standard delusions. I wonder how it could be that you have them, especially considering your mother wanted nothing to do with you.”

  “You know nothing about it,” The Boy said defensively.

  “On the contrary,” she said, walking around him and looking far too confident to suit The Boy’s comfort level. “I know all about it. Some you told me while you were still in the shadow of my brother. Our Miss Fix filled in the rest. How tragic that you think you can control all that transpires in the Anyplace when you cannot even control your mother’s love for you.”

  The Boy’s eyes smoldered with fury, but Captain Slash knew that she had pinked him, drawing virtual (if not actual) blood. “Villain,” he snarled, “if I were free right now, I’d—”

  “You’d what? Stop me? In the same way that you stopped the assault of the Seirenes?” She laughed loudly. “Or the way my brother, even though he was dead, was still able to outwit you? Consider that again: You were outwitted by a dead man’s shadow. And now you stand helpless before my men and me”—and she gestured with her normal hand at the pirates who had accompanied her. They roared in bawdy approval of her words, causing The Boy to flinch. Captain Slash shook her head in clear disappointment. “I have to say, I don’t understand you, Boy. How can you be confronted with mounting evidence of your own ineptitude and continue to have such an inflated sense of self-worth?”

  “There’s nothing inflated about it,” he said, but there was increased quavering in his voice, and the uncertainty was becoming so foul that it was generating its own stench. “One of me is worth twenty of you….”

  “There is only one of me, Boy, and that one has captured the one of you, so whose worth has been proven while whose was left wanting?” She whipped her sword back and forth just under his nose to add emphasis to just who was in charge. Were The Boy faster off the mark, he would have held the net up so that she could have inadvertently sliced it herself. But he failed to do so. “Is that, ultimately, why you refuse to grow up, Boy? Because you think that once you do, you’ll enter the adult world and lose control of your environment? Have you ever considered the possibility that your imagination is no longer the single greatest source of energy in the Anyplace, presuming it ever was? That the Anyplace is far more responsive to my manipulation, specifically because I am an adult? I know the way things work. I know the true order of the universe and am not afraid of it, nor afraid to exploit it.” She leaned in toward him, driving home a sword so metaphorical that the one upon her wrist didn’t come into play. “If—when—you die, Boy, the world will go on without you. That may be the single most difficult truth that all such as you must cope with. You will die…and life will continue. I’ll not shuffle off this immortal coil, nor will my crew, upon your passing. I will have my triumphs and tragedies, and you will be wholly unable to stop me. You’ll just watch helplessly from whatever ‘beyond’ will accept consignment of you. And you will have plenty of time—eternity, by my reckoning—to come to grips with the notion that you are no more important than I. Less important, actually, since I have command over your fate whereas you have none over mine.”

  She brought her sword forward and cut him lightly on the thigh. He let out a surprised, pained gasp, like a sleepwalker who has just been awakened via the timely application of a bucket of cold water.

  “Imagine that you rule the Anyplace, for all the difference it makes,” she whispered, and poked him again. “Imagine you can escape. Imagine that I am not about to sever your head from your shoulders with my sword. Use the full force of your imagination, by God, for all the good it will do you.” She waited as long seconds stretched by, and nothing happened. It might have been because the defeated Boy was hanging his head in mortified shame, consumed by the idea that he was helpless to control his own fate, much less anyone else’s, and feeling mighty foolish that he could ever have thought any other way.

  Boys’ egos are fragile things. It doesn’t matter if they are run-of-the-mill boys or magnificent boys. In The Boy’s case, he was a slave of his ego, and his ego had just gotten a royal pounding from the pirate queen. As always a creature of extremes, The Boy had gone from believing he was totally in control to being not in control at all, not unlike when he had been confronted by the wave. The newest tide of events was once again threatening to overwash him; and this time the outcome was going to be considerably more fatal.

  I am helples
s. As helpless as any adult, he thought miserably.

  And then, an instant before she could administer the coup de grâce—with her sword arm poised and shaking with anticipation—Simon the Dancer suddenly said, “Captain! Look!”

  She didn’t see it at first, peering through the underbrush as she was. But then she did, and her heart nearly stopped.

  “A tiger!” she said. “And not any tiger! The great snow tiger!”

  Sure enough, there was the unmistakable fur of the snow tiger, stalking them along the periphery of the clearing in which they stood. It had been utterly silent, but now with its presence clearly known, it growled softly…a precursor, no doubt, to the thunderously savage roar that would tear from its throat the instant it leaped into view.

  Captain Slash lived in fear of being eaten by some sort of savage creature. Her brother’s arm had been given over as an appetizer to a fearsome beast, and eventually the rest of his body had provided the entrée. There were many ways in which Mary Slash wanted to emulate her brother, the formidable Captain Hack, but meeting her end in an animal’s gullet was definitely not one of them.

  Consequently, the impending attack of the famed and formidable snow tiger of the Anyplace was more than enough to have Mary Slash sound the retreat. Her crew offered not the slightest argument, what with being cowards as mentioned earlier, and seconds later the pirates were fleeing the area. “What of The Boy?” said Simon the Dancer.

  “He’s what will delay the beast coming after us!” Slash said. “Let it sup on that tender morsel! That’ll keep it occupied so that we can get back to the ship and safety! A good day’s work, lads, seeing our greatest enemy left tied up to become tiger chow!”

  The Boy was not intimidated at all. His mind was barely on what was transpiring around him. He, like you, knew that the snow tiger had already met his fate. For that matter he also knew—as you no doubt have likewise intuited—just who, not what, was facing him now. But he felt nothing, even as the last of the pirate’s footfalls faded away into the bushes and trees and Paul’s fur-covered head popped up from behind the brush. “Are they gone?” he said with a lopsided grin.