“Good,” he said finally. “And this unfortunate Gunther business—let’s put that out of our minds for now, all right?”
What could I say? I nodded.
“And for my part,” Orosgo continued, “I will do my best to keep Sera from acting out his anger on you.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
“He is volatile. I can’t guarantee anything.”
“Neither can I.”
His smile was mirthless and razor thin. “Well …” he said softly. It was all he needed to say. It was a threat of death. Fail to find the book and you die. Go to the police about Gunther and you die. That simple.
And with that, my dinner with Orosgo was over. The next moment, he gestured to the bald thug behind me. And the moment after that, the bald thug stepped forward and slapped my car keys down on the table where my plate had been: jingle-whap.
Now, a potent mixture of too much wine and sudden relief and sneaking, gut-curdling suspense swam up into my head. I felt as if I was in a hazy, slo-mo dream as I walked along the slate path back to my Nissan. It wasn’t a good dream either, because I was thinking about how, in the gangster movies, they always pretended to let you go just before they garroted you and sent you to sleep with the fishes. I glanced over at Orosgo’s ranch, and just inside, a shadow within the shadows, there stood the figure of the assassin, his kitten face barely visible within the darkness. And on that face and in his eyes, I saw what anyone could see: his daydreams of my blood-soaked agony and my agonizing death.
I reached the car. I checked the back seat quickly to make sure no one was hiding there with a garrote. I pulled open the door and slipped inside.
“Oh, shit!” I shouted furiously.
I was seated on the black stallion again. I was back in Galiana.
THE STALLION AND I HAD JUST PASSED THROUGH THE Eastrim city gates. The horse was still traveling slowly amidst the crowd of pilgrims and the cloud of their dust. I was still a little hazy on Orosgo’s wine. I looked around me unsteadily. Peasants and merchants and a knight on horseback were all staring at me because—I suddenly realized—I’d shouted out in exasperation to find myself back here again: “Oh, shit!”
As I struggled to come to terms with this latest transition, it occurred to me that I didn’t need all these curious eyes staring at me, especially not when I was being hunted by the authorities and still within arrow-shot of the guards on the city wall.
I snapped the horse’s reins and guided him off the road. I urged him into the surrounding grassland with a brisk clucking noise, trying to put some distance between me and the rest of the travelers. My mad dinner with Orosgo and the strange story he’d told me and, yes, the fear and the wine were all still sloshing around in my brain, and really I just wanted to lie down somewhere and make this whole ordeal stop for a while. I would have said that this going back and forth between two worlds was driving me crazy except … well, except I must have already gone crazy or none of it would have been happening in the first place.
The stallion and I had moved a couple of dozen yards away from the dense crowd of people exiting the city when I felt a pinch on my foot. I looked down and saw Maud. The mutant rodent had leapt up out of the high weeds and grabbed me. And now she scrambled lightly, quickly, up my leggings and over the side of my saddle to take her place on the pommel again.
I groaned loudly. The rodent turned to me. “What? What’s the matter?”
What’s the matter? I wanted to say. What’s the matter? You’re a fucking rat with a woman’s face, that’s what’s the matter! You can talk, that’s what’s the matter. Best case scenario: You’re the emanation of a brain tumor. And even if I could cure the tumor and make you and this entire la-la land disappear, I’d only find myself back in la-la land proper with an insane billionaire and his gender-bending psycho killer after me. That’s what’s the matter, I wanted to say.
“Nothing,” I muttered sullenly.
The mutant creature gave a curt nod then leaned over to whisper in the horse’s ear. Because, of course, the horse could understand what the rat-woman was saying. Because that’s what it’s like when there’s a black growth the size of a cantaloupe devouring your cerebral cortex.
“To Shadow Wood,” the rodent said to the horse.
Huzzah. To fucking Shadow Wood.
And off we rode.
I WILL SAY this much for Galiana. It was a haunting gothic ruin of a country, sere and desolate and starkly beautiful. Once we broke full away from the others, we rode for hours in majestic loneliness across a blasted landscape under a looming, gathering dusk. Solitary, leafless trees bent wearily in the wind here and there, their branches rattling. Empty huts and broken towers rose on the horizon, grew large as they approached, and grimly hunkered over us then fell away behind. Now and then, at some abandoned window, in some fallen wreckage of a fortress or a home, or on some dusty path that once had been a highway, a wide-eyed starveling would turn to watch us pass, the remnant of what had sometime been a man or a woman. I saw the wistful hunger wreathing the faces of these people. They looked as if they half-remembered a longed-for time of human warmth and connection, but that time was gone. I wanted to ask them: What happened here? What happened to this country? But the effect of the wine was wearing off. I was exhausted and didn’t have the energy to listen to an answer. I just rode on in silence over the windswept land.
AS THE SUN was descending toward the horizon, we crossed a long, flat autumn vale. In the fading distance, I could make out the front line of a forest, red oaks and orange elms and yellow hickories and smoky-green conifers and cool, shadowy depths within.
“Is that it?” I asked the rodent. “Is that Shadow Wood?”
“Yes,” she told me. “Tauratanio’s kingdom.”
WE REACHED THE forest at sunset. Maud jumped down and told me to dismount, and I poured off the saddle like spilled gelatin. Leading the horse by the reins, I followed the mutant rodent into the trees.
Almost at once, the mist gathered around us, and the leaves folded over us, and the last light of day went dim. We were suddenly moving through a deep gloom, already shading into darkness. Maud scrambled ahead like a squirrel and quickly blended, like a squirrel would, with the tangled latticework of vines and branches. That latticework seemed to close in on me so that each direction looked the same as every other. The mist drifted eerily like fingers between the trees, further obscuring the way. Occasionally, the last red glint of the falling sun shot through a gap in the branches and reached me. Otherwise the deep twilight simply grew deeper as night came on.
Soon, I could barely see a foot in front of me. Soon after that, the forest came alive with noises. Peeper frogs came out and held their high-pitched conversations. Crickets jabbered. And things I couldn’t name moved along the ground, rattling the duff. A breeze coiled through the branches, and their brittle leaves shivered. In the thickening darkness, the forest seemed to fill with whispers.
I slowed down, looking around me. I was a city boy. I didn’t like it here. Even back home—in real life—if I found myself alone in the middle of nowhere after sunset, I got nervous. Scenes from horror movies would come into my mind. Vampires, werewolves, ghosts. Stupid, I know. Stupid there, anyway, back home in real life. Here—in Galiana—who could tell? There might actually be vampires and werewolves and ghosts lurking in the darkness. And by the way, where had Squirrel Girl gone? I could no longer find her in the darkness.
“Maud?” I called. It came out a dusty whisper. My mouth had gone dry.
I stood very still. I listened, hoping to hear her answer. For a moment, there was only the living noise of the forest. But then—then, faintly amidst the creature chatter and the sough of the breeze and the creak of branches and the rattle of leaves—there came another sound, a sound like music.
It was eerie, uncanny: a lingering melody, just off-key. It chilled me, like a specter’s touch. I don’t think I had ever heard a song so strange, so otherly. I felt I had lost the power to
move. I couldn’t do anything but stand there, listening, waiting to see what would happen next.
What happened next—so help me—was this.
The eerie melody grew louder. I caught glimpses, among the distant trees, of twinkling lights and swirling rainbow-colored clouds. The forest seemed to grow a little brighter, the tortuous shapes of vines and the skeletal fingers of branches that had moments before become invisible as the daylight died began to reemerge as the black of night turned indigo.
The eerie music filled the woods, surrounding me. I could hear it more clearly now. Pipes and tambourines and a ghostly choir of inhuman voices, high and wild. The sparks of light and the clouds of light grew brighter. Soon these surrounded me as well.
The air was fluttering, full of fairies. The shadowed woods were dancing with imps and antlered fauns and satyrs with their pipes of Pan and peak-capped trolls and sentient creatures I couldn’t name crawling along the duff and on the branches.
In the swirling mists of light, I saw a broad stream winding toward me between the tree trunks. And out of the water, nymphs were rising like mist, glowing nude women of an ivory perfection that made me swell with a kind of bold, natural, robust erotic desire that was nothing like the clammy lust I felt leering at the wannabes on LA’s streets or at the naked girls on my computer. It seemed I hadn’t felt like this in ages.
The weird, weird music played and played. The colored lights glittered and swirled. The fairy-tale creatures flew and gamboled and danced around me in an impossible vision of secret forest life. And the nymphs approached and circled me in the rainbow glow, their faces lovely, their bodies exquisitely rounded and soft. I watched breathlessly as they closed in. I gasped as they touched me. Some caressed me, some undressed me, some took me gently by the arms and led me to the stream. I could not have resisted them if I had wanted to. I didn’t want to.
They drew me naked along the banks of the water. We came to a clearing where the stream gathered in a pool. The fairies and the fauns and the imps and the satyrs were dancing here as well with their lights and music. The nymphs took me into the pool.
The water was warmer than I expected. It was velvety smooth and soft and only waist high. The nymphs bathed me and kissed my neck and cheeks and stroked my body until I raised my face to the stars and cried out in mindless ecstasy, purged of every dark and dirty thing. My weariness was gone. My fear of the forest dark was gone. Even my skinned knee and the pulsing bruise on my head from where Sir Aravist had struck me with his sword was healed and gone. The music played, and I lowered my eyes and gazed in wonder at the tender faces of the nymphs eddying around me in the eddying water. I didn’t care that there were creatures on every side who might be watching. I didn’t care about anything just then. All I knew was that I never wanted this to end.
But now the nymphs gently led me up out of the pool into the clearing. I felt calm and satisfied and clean. They dried me off with some soft white wool and dressed me in my clothes again, and my clothes felt crisp and clean as well.
I noticed now that the piping, jingling music of the wood had changed. It had grown steady and rhythmic and ceremonial, almost martial. I noticed that the creatures were slowing in their dance, and now they stopped. They stood where they were and turned to gaze into the distance. I followed their gazes and looked to where the colored outglow ended and the forest sank back into the blue-black dark beyond.
Now, out of that darkness, there came a stately procession. What I thought at first was a brigade of cavalry was coming through the trees in double file at a slow march. As they grew nearer, I saw they weren’t cavalry—not mounted men—but centaurs, men with the lower halves of horses, and their top halves muscular male figures carrying sabers at their shoulders. Female centaurs—lighter in color but with the same muscular grace—rode on the outskirts of the ranks, in attendance on their soldier men.
They marched closer. And in the midst of them, two figures seemingly all of light manifested themselves. First the darkness glowed a little in the two places, then each glow expanded, then each congealed into a radiant figure, and then the figures grew solid while still remaining luminous. The figure to the left was a rotund, heavily bearded man, his eyes bright and merry, his cheeks red, and his high forehead crowned with leaves. He rode in a chariot made of light, and the chariot was drawn by four horses of light who pawed the empty air above the ground as they flew along, pulling him after. The figure in the chariot to the right of him was a woman the color of the moon, long and lithe and unbelievably beautiful, with moon-colored hair and drifting robes that seemed to flow off her like water.
“That’s Tauratanio and Magdala. They rule the forest,” whispered Maud. She had suddenly reappeared, clinging by her claws to the trunk of the tree beside me. Her weird woman’s face was giving me an ironic, knowing look. My cheeks went hot as it occurred to me she might have been watching when I was getting it on with the nymphs in the water. But there wasn’t much I could do about it now.
I turned again to watch the oncoming parade.
ESCORTED BY THEIR centaur cavalry, the king and queen entered the clearing in their chariots of light. I have to admit, if this was a hallucination caused by a brain disorder—and, let’s face it, what the hell else could it have been?—it was a damned majestic one. The two forest royals dismounted and moved hand in hand to two thrones of light that had manifested themselves miraculously out of the dark at the center of the grove. They sat, and the court formed around them—nymphs, satyrs, fauns, peak-capped trolls, and all the rest—in semicircular rows at their feet, while the fairies sparkled in the surrounding trees like Christmas lights.
The king’s voice boomed, jovial and mellow, “Show me the man!”
That, apparently, meant me. The nude nymphs took me gently by my arms and led me before the thrones. I stood before the king and queen, squinting into their light. Tauratanio looked me up and down. I could see the smile buried in the thick beard beneath his twinkling eyes. Magdala, his queen, examined me too with a sweet, serene regard. I was still swathed in the post-coital calm of my encounter with the nymphs, so I was not as nervous under their gazes as I might have been. Still, instinctively, I bowed my head to the two light figures. Somehow I found I wanted to please them. I wanted them to like me.
The king now cast a look beyond me at Maud. He nodded to her as if, I thought, to thank her for carrying out my rescue. I turned in time to see the girl-rat shrug her rodent shoulders as if to say: He’s not much, I know, but he’s all I could find.
Tauratanio laughed a Santa Claus laugh. “So,” he said—and I faced him. “So you’re Austin Lively.”
How crazy was it to hear this king of silver light speak my everyday name? Crazy. But at this point, crazy was my default setting. I nodded. “Yes.”
“And Queen Elinda sent you?”
I raised my hands helplessly. “I don’t know the queen.”
“She knows you, apparently.”
The forest lady spoke from beside him. Her voice flowed like her robes and her hair. “And the important thing is: you’ve come.”
It was the oddest thing. They were speaking as if everything that was happening made sense to them, as if all this were real and even normal instead of impossible and insane. And you know what else was bizarre? Besides everything, I mean? What was also bizarre was that this conversation I was having now was no more incomprehensible to me than the conversation I’d just had in LA with Orosgo. In some ways this—this here—was not even as disturbing as that, because it didn’t mean I had to reconsider my entire life and who my parents were and what my brother did and how I fit into it all. I just had to—I don’t know—accept that what couldn’t possibly be happening was happening.
“But how?” I asked them, turning from one to the other. “How did I get here?”
“That’s the wrong question, my dear,” Magdala said sweetly.
“The right question,” said Tauratanio with a deep chuckle, “is why?”
I rais
ed my hands again, just as helplessly as before. “All right, then. Why?”
“To find the queen’s talisman and deliver it to Emperor Anastasius,” said the king, as if this ought to have been obvious to anyone. “So he knows to return from the Eleven Lands and restore her to her throne.”
Right. The talisman. The Eleven Lands. The Emperor Anastasius. Of course. What the hell was he talking about?
“But … why me?” I said. It was the first of the million questions in my mind to come tumbling out of my mouth.
“Because there are no more men here,” said Magdala.
“No fighting men,” Tauratanio said.
“No fighting men of brave heart and right belief,” added Magdala.
At this, I couldn’t help but look over my shoulder again at Maud. The rodent rolled her eyes. Now I understood her impatience with me, her disapproving looks, that snappy order: “Be a man.” Queen Elinda had sent me to Galiana because there were no more men here? No more fighting men of brave heart and right belief? She had sent me? Me? Were they kidding? What the hell was she thinking? I was no brave fighting man. I was from Hollywood. No one was brave there. Not brave-brave where maybe you died at the end with nobody watching. No one in show business had to be brave like that. You just had to pretend to be brave while they took pictures of you pretending. That was the whole job.
And right belief? As I turned back to the forest king and queen, all of a sudden and for the first time in my life, it occurred to me to wonder: What were my beliefs? And the answer came to me with a plummeting nausea that broke clean through my nymphean satisfaction: I had no freaking idea. None. I believed … what everyone believed, I guess. Be good? Be nice? Be fair? Sell a script and direct a movie and become a star so I could give interviews on TV about how good and nice and fair I was? How brave?
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