Fool on the Hill

by Matt Ruff

  George had a few ideas on the matter. He might occasionally be foolish, but he wasn’t stupid, and he would have been a bad storyteller indeed not to recognize a fairy tale when he saw one. But even if he chose to believe what the sheer madness of this past year made it possible to believe, that someone in Power was recreating a Brothers Grimm fantasy, what could he do about it?

  Tuesday and Wednesday were passed in the stacks of Uris and Olin Libraries on the campus, searching for an answer to that question. Olin was one of the most comprehensive book repositories in the country, but not even the self-help craze of the Eighties had produced so much as a single pamphlet on how to escape from someone else’s daydream. George buried himself in the literature of Malory, Chaucer, and even, God help him, Edmund Spenser. In an ancient edition of The Catholic Encyclopedia he read about St. George, who three times had been put to death only to be resurrected, and who had bled milk instead of blood when a beheading finally finished him. None of this was remotely inspiring, or very cheerful, either, and when George returned to Aurora’s hospital bed Wednesday evening he acted on instinct rather than learning, trying the most classic cure for enchanted sleep: The Kiss.

  It didn’t work. The critics might call him a Saint, but no one had ever accused George of being a Prince, and Aurora slept on. Feeling that he had failed her in some fundamental way, he went home fuming at himself, ate a disgusting amount of take-out pizza, and slept fitfully for six hours.

  It wasn’t fair; it was like Writer’s Block, that most horrible point in the telling of a story when you had no clue what was supposed to happen next and the mere sweep of the second hand on your watch was enough to scatter your thoughts, foil your attempts at concentration. And George wasn’t even in charge of this Story, that was the worst part.

  Rising before dawn Thursday morning, determined to do something, George burst from his house with a fiercely hopeful look on his face that scared hell out of a passing jogger. The only plan of action that had occurred to him—and a sketchy one at that—was that he must somehow prove himself, like a true knight of old, through brave: or charitable deeds. Then his Kiss would have the potency it now lacked.

  Only trouble was, bravery and charity didn’t seem to want to have a thing to do with him that day. Strolling along the edge of Cascadilla Gorge while darkness still lay on the land, George heard what sounded like desperate cries from below; but after nearly killing himself trying to reach the Gorge bottom, he found a contented—though chilly—couple who needed nothing except, perhaps, a thicker sleeping bag Embarrassed, George followed a path down into town, where he attempted to offer his protective services to children on their way to school, but they all ran away from him, terrified by the look on his face; a dowdy old matron he tried to help across a busy street left him choking on a breath of Mace.

  This sort of thing went on, literally, until well into afternoon, by which time he had ranged back up and around far north of The Hill, beyond Cayuga Heights. The rain caught him in open country, out of sight of any shelter, and while it brought chaos to Ithaca it brought nothing to George other than a good soaking. Worn out, his desperation to revive Aurora changing to anger at the still-unseen Author of his miseries, he plodded the back roads shouting dire threats at the clouds, from which he imagined he could hear the faintest echoing of laughter.

  “What are you waiting for?” he bellowed. “I’m ready to take whatever you’ve got, so let’s bring it on already!”

  A new sound: a siren, approaching from behind him. George turned expectantly, feeling incredible release, the moment come at last, a task to perform for the glory of his Princess. But he was wrong; the red pick-up truck that came flying down the road, a police car close on its tail, was not the test of chivalry he’d been searching for. There was nothing he could do but jump back out of the way, stumbling blindly under the spray of mud the two vehicles kicked up as they roared past. They were gone as quickly as they had appeared, Sam Doubleday’s cries to “Pull over, you fuck!” lingering longest in their wake. Then no sound but the pattering of the rain, George’s angry exhale, and the faint heavenly laughter.

  “All right,” George said, furious. “All right, that’s the way you want to play.”

  Freshly determined, he set off in the direction the truck and cop car had gone. But it was past dark by the time he finally found someone in need of his help, and by that point, he almost wasn’t paying attention.

  II.

  If George was nearly untouched by the madness raining down on Ithaca, Ragnarok found himself practically swimming in it as he raced up University Avenue toward Fraternity Row, eager to do to Jack Baron what Jack had done to his bike. The mayhem seemed to have concentrated itself along his chosen route, like a Dali painting brought to life and scattered in a line along the Hillside. In one house he passed someone with a lunatic’s cackle was hurling model trains through the individual squares of a many-paned living room window; twenty yards beyond that, another someone had decided to toss their furniture into the middle of the Avenue: a warped highboy, a rain-soaked divan, a shattered standing mirror.

  Not far beyond that, as he was cursing the slowness of his legs, Ragnarok came upon another Daliesque apparition: a purple-maned horse, led by a hairy man in leather with a six-pack clipped to his belt. Z.Z. Top had been on West Campus when the Dark Rain began and things got decidedly weird. A polite argument between two passing Cornellians had metamorphosed without warning into a rib-smashing brawl that took the efforts of six other bystanders to break up.

  “Got the hell away from that scene,” Z.Z. Top would have explained, if Ragnarok had given him time, “and then I saw Lion-Heart’s horse zipping down the road with no rider. Took me half of forever to catch up and calm him down.”

  But Ragnarok did not stop to chat. As it was the Top barely had time to recognize him before the stallion’s reins were torn out of his grasp and he was roughly shoved aside.

  “Hey!” the Top shouted, as Ragnarok slipped one foot inexpertly into a stirrup and tried to lift himself into the saddle. “Rag, what do you think you’re d—”

  “Need the speed,” Ragnarok barked at him, and with a determined lunge managed to get himself astride the stallion. Still clutching his mace in one hand he gave the reins a vicious yank to turn the horse, which neighed in protest.

  “Ragnarok,” the Top began. “Ragnarok, wait, you don’t know how—”

  Too late. A stout kick, a cry of “Giddap!” and stallion and rider were off at a suicidally fast gallop.

  “ . . . don’t know how to ride a horse,” Z.Z. finished. And watched them vanish into the rain.

  III.

  Rain pounded against the walls of Rho Alpha Tau, but the Brothers paid little attention to it, or to the chaos going on outside. A party of five—Bill Chaney, Bobby Shelton, and three others—had gathered in the House game room for a game of True Stud Poker, a special variant utilizing nude playing cards. Even as Ragnarok was taking the horse from Z.Z. Top, Chaney took Shelton for a twenty-five-dollar pot.

  “Two pair, Linda Lovelace high,” he announced, to which Norris Mailer, another Brother, could not resist adding: “Looks like four pair to me, Bill.”

  Bobby Shelton gave him a black look. “You know any jokes that aren’t as old as Martha Washington’s underwear, Norris?”

  Chaney took the pot; Mailer, chastened, gathered in the cards and took his turn as dealer. They were in the middle of the next hand when Jack Baron came in. His step was almost silent and at first only Bobby Shelton noticed him, but soon they had all turned around to look. Norris Mailer goggled openly.

  The House President was still damp from his early sojourn in the rain. His hair lay close to his skull, and his eyes were wide, searching. One fist was curled tightly around the sledgehammer he had used to demolish Ragnarok’s motorcycle and house; at the moment he looked very anxious to try his hand at demolishing a skull or two. This look was not deceiving.

  “Doing some yardwork, Jack?” Shelton asked,
eyeing the sledgehammer. “Putting up a tent, maybe?”

  “Where is he?” Jack studied each of them with extreme suspicion. “He ought to be here by now. Who’s seen him?”

  “Seen who?” said Bill Chaney. He was studying the door, wondering how quickly he could get through it in a pinch.

  “Ragnarok, of course! Son of a bitch should have been here a long time ago!”

  “Why would he be here, Jack?” asked Shelton. Jack made no answer to this question, turning his attention instead to the grandfather clock that dominated one end of the room. Its ticking was slow and not particularly loud, but to the Rho Alpha President, who had heard it from three rooms away, it sounded almost mocking. When it began suddenly to chime the hour he stepped up to it and planted the sledgehammer in its face.

  “Hey!” Norris Mailer cried, definitively demonstrating his stupidity by getting up to interfere. “Hey, hey, my old man paid for that cl—”

  Jack whirled on him, felling him with one stroke of the hammer; with equal swiftness, Bill Chaney bolted from his chair.

  “Where is he?” Jack roared at the three remaining poker players, “I want him here now! I WANT HIM HERE NOW!"

  On the floor, Mailer clutched at what was left of his nose and screamed through broken teeth.

  IV.

  Ragnarok would have been more than happy to oblige Jack, but his cavalry charge on Rho Alpha Tau was destined for a premature end. He got as far as the Cayuga Heights Bridge before his luck, and the stallion’s tolerance for abuse, ran out. He had driven the horse as he would have driven his bike, to break all speed records, and despite his lack of riding experience he thought he had everything under control right up until the moment the animal threw him. They were halfway across the bridge, Gorge roaring below, when all at once the stallion seemed to skid. Its shoulders dropped; its hindquarters came up, catapulting him into the air.

  With perfect detachment he watched the world turn over. He fully expected to go flying over the side, and somehow it was not important that this would keep him from reaching Jack. His last thought before crashing bodily into the guardrails was that the rain seemed to be slacking off.

  The shock of impact rang in his head; his sunglasses broke in half, falling into the Gorge while he himself dropped back onto the cold metal of the bridge, blood running from a cut above his eye, pupils wide to the thinning rain. The stallion seemed to study him for a moment, then snorted and moved on across the bridge, where it began cropping the dead grass by the entrance to Carl Sagan’s house.

  A half hour passed while Ragnarok lay unconscious on the bridge. During that time the rain stopped completely, and Stephen George found his way back to The Hill, wet, muddy, exhausted. After a brief and fruitless march down Fraternity Row during which, still, no damsel in distress or other potential good deed showed itself, the storyteller decided to return home and reconsider his strategy. It was about two minutes after making this decision that he came upon the fallen Bohemian . . . whom he very nearly walked past without noticing.

  This time George felt no surge of victory, no release. He simply checked to make sure that Ragnarok was still breathing and then hurried to call an ambulance.

  Naturally, it did not occur to him that he had finally found what he had been yelling for all afternoon.

  AT THE HOSPITAL

  I.

  When Ragnarok’s senses returned to him he was lying in a private room in Tompkins County General. His forehead was bandaged and one of his ribs had been taped up, but other than that he was in remarkably good shape, except for the drained and ashen pallor of his face.

  “You look like tofu,” Myoko said affectionately, when he blinked his eyes open.

  “Maybe next time you decide to steal my horse,” Lion-Heart added, “you’ll remember to ask for a few riding lessons first.”

  Wincing, Ragnarok raised his head a few inches, looked around curiously. “Did I kill him?” he asked, his voice weak.

  “Charlemagne’s fine,” said Lion-Heart, thinking he meant the horse. “Luckily enough, and no thanks to you. What the hell were you up to, anyway?”

  “Never mind that now,” Myoko interrupted. “How do you feel, Ragnarok?”

  The Black Knight’s head dropped back against the pillow. He seemed not to have heard them. Withdrawn, he whispered to himself: “No, I didn’t. Not yet.”

  Myoko and Lion-Heart exchanged glances. Then she said, more tentatively: “Ragnarok? Visiting hours are almost over, but Jinsei ought to be here in about fifteen minutes. Do you want to see her when she gets here?”

  “Not yet,” Ragnarok repeated, and all at once he was sitting up, struggling to get out of bed.

  “Wait a second, Rag,” Lion-Heart said, alarmed. “Doctor said you’re supposed to rest. They don’t know if you’ve got a concussion or not.”

  “I have to talk to Stephen George,” the Black Knight insisted.

  “You can thank him for bringing you in tomorrow, Rag. You can call him on the phone, OK?”

  “Don’t need to.” His feet tested the floor for firmness; he tried to stand, did stand. “Don’t need the phone, he’s here in the hospital.”

  “No, George went home a while ago. Said he hoped you’d be—”

  “He’s here. Visiting Aurora.”

  “Aurora?” Myoko said.

  “How do you know that?” Lion-Heart asked. “How do you know that, Rag?”

  Ragnarok paused, puzzled by the question. “How? . . . I just do. Someone—” he glanced briefly at Myoko, “—someone must have whispered in my ear while I was out. In a dream, maybe. I’ve got to give George a message.”

  “Tomorrow, Rag. You can give it to him tomorrow, OK?”

  “Tomorrow’s too late,” said Ragnarok. He fought his way out of the thin blue hospital robe someone had dressed him in, looked around for his own clothes. “Tomorrow’s what it’s all about. . . .”

  II.

  There were two other beds in Aurora’s hospital room, but both were empty. The lights were out, leaving the moon—the clouds had dispersed—to shine in and illuminate the sleeping Princess. The storyteller sat in the darkened half of the room, watching her; she was, as he had told her, a beautiful sleeper. Radiantly beautiful now, despite three days in a sickbed. As much as anything else, this beauty gave him hope.

  It still had the feel of a fairy tale, that was the thing. He had been made a fool of today, in his quest for a chivalric act to perform (in his mind, his discovery of Ragnarok did not come close to qualifying), that much was true, but it didn’t change the basic situation. The Poisoned Apple; the Sleeping Princess; the test of valor waiting to be taken. Being drenched by the rain and laughed at by the clouds had not caused George to doubt his sanity, or, for long, dampened his optimism. He had been balked, he was still angry; but he wasn’t ready to quit.

  Loosely cupped in his right hand were four seeds from the Apple; every so often he shook them like dice, listening to the sound they made. He had them rattling like wind-up teeth when he became aware of a third presence in the room, a figure standing directly behind him.

  For an instant George thought it must be Calliope. When he turned and saw Ragnarok instead, though, he wasn’t really surprised.

  “In The Boneyard,” Ragnarok said. The Bohemian spoke with the voice of a ghost reciting lines in someone else’s play.

  “What’s that?” George’s fist was clenched tight, the apple seeds silenced.

  “It’s in The Boneyard.” Ragnarok told him. “What you’ve been looking for. Calliope left you a present.”

  He slumped a little, his duty discharged. A hand stole its way up to touch the bandage above his eye. “Tired,” he said, in a voice more his own. “Headache.”

  “Wait,” George said, as he turned to go, and Ragnarok waited . . . but there didn’t seem much point in questioning him. Instead the storyteller reached for something on the nightstand beside Aurora’s bed, offered it, a return gift. “This is yours, I think. It was lying next to you o
n the bridge.”

  Ragnarok flinched a bit at the sight of his mace. At first he seemed reluctant to claim it, but then a burning in one eye called up a memory of Jack Baron, and his hand closed around the black handle of the weapon. “All right,” he said, accepting it. And then: “I’ll see you tomorrow, George. You do what you have to do tonight, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  He turned, shambled out of the room. Alone again with the Princess, George wondered if he might have hallucinated the whole thing. But not for long.

  He called a taxi, and fifteen minutes later was on his way back to The Hill. To The Boneyard.

  FRACTOR DRACONIS

  The Boneyard was large, but it wasn’t hard for him to guess where he had to go. He entered the cemetery from the downhill side, scrambling up a slope between jutting mausoleums, heading for the far north end.

  The wind blew at his back as he made his way through the trees; it blew cold, offering no comfort. George moved as swiftly as he could, and soon entered the area where the main body of Rasferret’s army was preparing for a pre-dawn march up The Hill. George passed the demon-adorned tombstone of Harold Lazarus without noticing it. The marble gargoyle crouched atop the stone watched him pass; so did the company of Rats clustered at its base. As the storyteller topped another rise, a cordon began to close behind him.

  He stood at the crest of a burial mound, the bones of Ithaca war dead beneath his feet. Moonlight cast a circle around him, ringed the mound with shadow. From these shadows came the first sound, a rustling of rotten leaves like the approach of small animals. The second sound was harder to identify, a faint twanging.

  He was on his way down the far side of the mound when the first tiny crossbow bolt struck him. George felt a sharp sting in his ankle and reached down to pluck a sharp sliver of bone from his pants cuff. More missiles flew, some bone, some metal. George jerked around as pain flared in his calves; his feet tangled and he fell, landing in a shallow gully.