by Peter David
“I got too full of myself, playing games with those pirates, beating them.” He was speaking with excessive slowness. He sounded as if he were trying to remember how to pronounce every single word before it left his lips. “If I hadn’t done that . . . if I hadn’t gotten them angry . . .”
“You’re being ridisculous,” Thomas chided him. Then he frowned, and said again, “Ri-dis-cu-lous,” continuing to mangle the word but at least enunciating it meticulously. “They were pirates, John.”
“James.”
“Whoever the hell you are. The point is ...” He stopped, frowned, his eyes bleary. “What was the point . . . ?”
“Pirates.”
“Right. Exactly. They were pirates. You heard the captain, right before he was ripped to pieces ...”
James raised his half-empty bottle of whatever. “To Captain Rackam. He died a man of parts.”
Thomas burst out laughing, as did James. So overwhelmed with mirth was Thomas that he actually fell over, dropping the bottle, but there was no harm done since he had just emptied it. The bottle rolled away as Thomas held his stomach and continued to howl with laughter. James was laughing as well, but in a fashion that sounded more like a long, sustained hiccup.
“That’s . . . that’s not funny,” Thomas said as he gasped for breath. “That . . . that’s really not funny, James. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
“I am. I truly am.” But he didn’t particularly sound it.
“It was a horrible thing . . . what happened to him ...”
“Not much worse than what he had planned for us.”
At that observation, Thomas finally did manage to get himself under control, his face darkening. He remained lying on the floor, but he pointed at James, and said, “Yes. Exactly. What he had planned. You said it yourself. The fact is, you forced the issue. They were humoring us, probably because it amused them to do so. But we were never going to make it to port alive. If not for you . . . and if not for your stupid dog . . . they’d probably have murdered us in our sleep. Apologize?” He blew air disdainfully. “I’m the one who should be begging your pardon.”
“How do you figure that?”
“How do I—?” He was astounded that James even had to ask. He propped himself up on one elbow. He tried to look James in the eyes, but James had appeared to develop the inconsiderate attribute of wavering from one side to the other, not to mention unaccountably dividing every so often for no discernible reason. Thomas closed his eyes so he wouldn’t have to look at him. “How far back do you want me to go? To my own stupidity and overconfidence in choosing pirates to be our means of crossing the sea? I went with the first boat—”
“Ship.”
“—whatever. The first ship that was willing to take us, without even giving thought to checking with anyone else.”
“You said you checked around.”
“Barely. Casual inquiry, at best. Hell, probably they were all pirates at that wharf. I should have figured that could be a possibility. Stupid!” he snapped at himself and, for good measure, struck himself in the side of the head with the base of his palm. This proved to be an astoundingly bad idea as Thomas’s eyes crossed, and he fell off his own elbow, to be left lying prostrate once more. Deciding that he would be well-advised to simply stay where he was, he continued while reclining. “Then how about the fact that this whole crazy trip was my idea in the first place? If I hadn’t talked you into this—”
“Talked me into this?” James continued to lean against the wall; since it graciously provided support, tumbling over wasn’t an issue. “I talked you into bringing me along, remember?”
“Yes, I remember, but if I hadn’t suggested it—”
“If, if, if,” James said, and then added a snort for good measure, “How much do you want to play that game? Endless second-guessing of everything in your life. That’s the problem with smart, well-read people like you, Thomas. You’re always thinking, thinking, thinking about the road you already walked and trying to wonder whether it would have been better if you’d taken the right fork instead of the left fork or the left fork instead of the right fork. Well . . . fork that. You can ‘if’ this all the way back to when we first met as children, and it’ll still all come down to the same thing.”
“Yeah? What thing is that?”
James leaned forward and started to topple. Poxy quickly stepped in, and James leaned on her so that he didn’t fall completely. Thomas couldn’t help but notice that the dog hadn’t bothered to provide support for him. “The thing is: I would not have missed this for the world.”
“Really.” Thomas wasn’t convinced. “We’ve almost been eaten several times, we almost drowned, we almost—”
“‘A lmost’ means nothing.”
“It means we could have died and were damned lucky not to have. I mean, be honest with me, James. You can’t be having a good time.”
“It’s an adventure. Of course we’re not having a good time,” said James matter-of-factly. “When you’re on an adventure, the good times are had from a distance. You remember everything you went through and laugh about it and marvel at the fact that you’re still alive.”
“That’s assuming we’re still alive to marvel at it.”
“Of course we’re still going to be alive,” James said firmly. “You said it yourself. The number of ‘almosts’ that have lain between us and death have been piling up, and yet here we are. By any reasonable measure, we should be dead. But we’re not. Do you know why?”
Thomas shook his head.
“Me neither,” James said with a twisted grin. “But I’ll tell you this: We two, we’re not meant to wind up in the belly of some beast or at the bottom of the sea or lying out to be carrion bait. Because if that was our destiny, then we’d have met it already. The fact that we’re here proves that we’re going to succeed in our goal.”
“What’s scary is that that actually makes some measure of sense,” Thomas admitted. “Because I’m pretty sure that it actually makes no sense at all, which just goes to show how much I’ve had to drink.”
“The fact that you’re lying on the floor pretty much makes that clear.”
“So . . . what are you saying? That we don’t have to worry about fatal mishaps because there’s no way we can fail?”
“Oh, there are plenty of ways that we can fail. We still have to be careful, watch our backs, and everything else that men who are not destined for success have to do. Triumph isn’t a given; you have to work for it. But I’m just sure that we’re going to reach our goal and find the balverines.”
“At which point . . . ?”
“They’ll likely rip us apart.”
Thomas laughed loudly once more, a reaction that some part of him couldn’t begin to fathom considering there was nothing remotely funny about the comment. It drove home to him the truth of the lunacy upon which he had embarked: that even if somehow he did manage to accomplish his goal, he might well be bringing them directly to their deaths. He had no real idea what success in this mission would ultimately look like. The head of the balverine who had slain his brother mounted on a pike? It was beyond unlikely. It was preposterous.
There was only one true, realistic outcome.
“We’re both going to die,” Thomas said. “We’re barreling at full speed toward a confrontation that we cannot possibly survive. That is what success is going to look like: our corpses.”
“Then they’ll be well-preserved, thoroughly pickled corpses!” James declared loudly. “To success!” And he raised the mostly empty bottle and finished draining it.
“To success!” Thomas said, just as loudly and raising his hand, which was bereft of bottle.
Neither remembered much of anything after that.
THEY AWOKE AT ROUGHLY THE SAME TIME, but neither of them was particularly inclined to stand up. Instead, they simply lay there on the floor, staring glassy-eyed at each other, as if they had just awoken to discover, much to their mutual surprise, that they were abo
ut to be dropped into their graves.
“Am I dead?” James said after a time.
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
He started to sit up, and the world spun around him so violently that he had no choice but to thud back to the floor. The noise startled Poxy awake. She raised her head, looked around, then glowered at James to make sure he was aware of her lack of approval for rousting her. Then she settled her head back on her paws and closed her eyes once more.
“Why,” said James with a low moan, “am I not dead?”
“Well . . . because no one killed you.”
“Why didn’t they? Why couldn’t they do me that favor? Some random assassin, maybe, coming to me in my sleep and slitting my throat. Then I wouldn’t have to wake up feeling like this.”
Thomas was now sitting up, squinting against the few shafts of daylight that were filtering into the room. “James,” he asked tentatively, “are my legs longer this morning?”
“What?”
“My legs. Are they longer this morning than they were last night?”
James studied them for a bit. “No,” he finally decided. “They look pretty much the same. Why?”
“I could swear that my feet are farther away than when I last looked at them.”
“No. Same distance. Still attached to your ankles. But I think my tongue is about to fall out of my mouth.”
“You’d be lucky,” said Thomas. “I wish I didn’t have a tongue. Then I couldn’t taste anything, and I wouldn’t feel like I have a mouth full of sewage.”
“There’s only one thing to do.”
“Yeah? What?”
“Drink some more. I liked how that felt.”
Thomas coughed roughly, which brought up some phlegm that he spat into the far corner of the room. It struck a roach that had been trying to make its way across the floor and knocked it over onto its back, where it lay with its legs frantically waving. Thomas watched it until he lost interest. “We can’t keep drinking, as tempting as that might be. We’ve made it to the eastern lands. Now we keep heading east.”
“Sounds like a plan,” said James
“And one that I absolutely intend to put into action right after I go outside and vomit.”
“An even better plan. Let me know how it goes.” And then he flopped back onto the floor and fell back asleep.
Between Thomas’s extended bout with nausea and James’s thundering headache that pounded in his skull as if someone were striking him repeatedly with a club, they were not fully themselves until the sun had crawled nearly to the noon hour. They ate a simple meal of bread and cheese since the innkeeper didn’t exactly have much variety, nor were they feeling especially hungry, although Poxy certainly fed eagerly enough on table scraps.
Finally, packing up their effects, they took ready leave of the inn, with the master of the house continuing to glare suspiciously at the dog. The boys remained as clueless that day as they were in the evening as to why Poxy was garnering those sorts of suspicious and angry looks from the innkeeper but were willing to chalk it up to the idea that he simply despised canines.
But as they walked about the undersized, underdeveloped city, James slowly began to realize that the master of the house had not been alone in his objections to Poxy. There were not many people out in the streets, but those who were quickly crossed to the other side of the street when James and Thomas passed by, and the dog was the subject of much discussion and many sidelong and suspicious glances. Poxy was blissfully unaware, of course, but it was impossible for the attention the dog was drawing to escape the notice of the boys.
“What the hell is going on around here?” James finally said in exasperation to Thomas, only to discover that Thomas was paying him no mind. Instead, he saw, to his surprise, that Thomas’s hands were trembling as he held a sheet of paper in his hand. He had plucked it off the outside wall of a tavern. It was hardly unique; from where they were standing, James could see copies of the hand-scrawled notice running up and down the length of the main cobbled street, as if the poster were concerned that they would be remiss if someone should be able to walk ten feet without encountering it.
“Look at this. James, look. Can you believe it?”
“It is truly astounding,” James said drily. “It looks to be some sort of flexible material—possibly made from trees—with writing upon it. Here I thought writing could only be chiseled upon stone tablets.”
“You’re a riot, James.”
“My head is still throbbing. You’re lucky I’m walking. Asking for jokes that are funny is just way too much. What is all this about—?”
“A woman ...”
“That’s when the trouble usually starts,” James said ruefully.
“A woman,” Thomas pressed on, with a warning look to James that he should not make light of the situation, “is looking for help over the disappearance of her daughter. A daughter that she swears was taken by a balverine.”
“Taken by—?” He took the paper from Thomas and read it. It was exactly as Thomas described it. A local woman was seeking out a Hero to investigate the disappearance of her daughter, and she was convinced that a balverine, or possibly balverines, were responsible.
“She wants a Hero and believes in balverines,” said James in wonderment. “It’s like we’ve stepped back in time or something.”
Thomas said, “The eastern lands seem to be more backwards than where we came from.”
“No kidding. Maybe it’s because they’re way less industrialized. Hell, maybe that’s the problem with machines in general,” said James.
“You lost me.”
“Well, it takes work to believe in what can’t be seen. The whole purpose of machines is to make life and tasks easier. Industrialization takes the wondrous and makes it mundane. How can people be amazed in a world of mundanity?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Thomas. “Believing in the unseen requires no effort at all. Faith is a convenient substitute for thought.”
“I’m not sure I agree.”
“And I’m not sure I care,” Thomas said firmly, waving the sheet of paper in James’s face. “All I care is that, back home, the whole idea of Heroes is considered quaint, out-of-date, even arrogant. To say nothing of how people look at us like we’re idiots every time we bring up balverines.” James couldn’t refute that; he knew it to be true. “And here,” continued Thomas, “is a woman who is reaching out for help. Screw the reasons for it. All I care about is that if we can find her daughter, maybe we can find the balverines we’re looking for.”
“And once we find them?”
“We save the girl, hopefully without getting killed.”
James thought about it a moment and then nodded approvingly. “Okay, then. Let us see a mother about a daughter.”
IT TOOK ONLY A BIT OF ASKING AROUND TO locate the home of the woman who had put up the flyers. Everyone in the town knew her, and although they continued to cast suspicious glances at the dog, they didn’t hesitate to point Thomas and James in the right direction so that, within the hour, they were standing outside a house that was only a step or two up from a hovel, situated on a decent-sized piece of land that served as a not-particularly-prosperous farm. Thomas rapped on the door with as much authority as he could muster. They heard some shuffling about from within, and then it creaked open to reveal a man so massive, with a sullen glare so inherently threatening, that Thomas stepped back and almost reached for his sword out of reflex. The man had a thick chin to which some grayish whiskers were clinging, a low-hanging unibrow from beneath which piglike eyes glowered, a wide nose that appeared to have been broken at least twice, a mass of salt-and-pepper curls . . .
... and a shapeless dress that hung almost down to his thick ankles.
“Who are ye?” said the man in a voice that was surprisingly light and even female in nature . . .
It’s a woman. Holy hell, it’s a woman.
T
homas could see that James was coming to the same conclusion and looked equally stunned in the realization. Rebounding as quickly as he could, Thomas held up the flyer that was fluttering in a stiff breeze. “We—” And his voice cracked slightly, so Thomas cleared his throat and began again. “We are here because of your notice. Because of your daughter.”
“Aye, but who are ya?” she said again. “Yer not from around here. I can tell from yer accent, yer clothes, yer—” Then her eyes widened as she looked past Thomas. Quickly, she reached into her home, grabbed something that he couldn’t see, then shoved him out of the way as if he weighed nothing and came out wielding a muck-encrusted spade. She came right at Poxy, bellowing a string of profanities. Poxy bounded back, her ears down, barely escaping the sweep of the digging implement.
James had been momentarily paralyzed by the unexpected assault, but with a moment to adjust to the situation, he leaped onto the woman’s back and clung to it like an infant monkey to its mother. “Hold it!” he shouted, and the female behemoth backpedaled quickly, a move that confused James right up until she crushed him up against her home. Fortunately, the wood of which the sides were composed was not particularly sturdy, and instead of breaking every bone in his body, the impact caused him to crash right through the house and wind up lying on the floor of the room that served as the living room, dining room, kitchen, and, for all he knew, privy, at least judging by the smell of it.
In the street, she continued to swing the shovel at Poxy, who dodged this way and that, desperately avoiding her but clearly reluctant to vacate the area since she had no desire to abandon her masters. The woman continued to bellow imprecations at the dog, and the entire business might well have gone on all day if she hadn’t heard the distinctive cocking of a crossbow. She turned, still holding the shovel defensively, and Thomas was standing a safe distance away with his crossbow aimed at her.
“I could be using my rifle right now,” he said with a calmness that he didn’t quite feel, and thus had to force his voice to remain flat and even. “But I’m not sure I could shoot you without killing you. I’m a bit more confident with this that you’ll survive it. So that should tell you that we’re not here to hurt you ...”