by Rick Shelley
"I think I have just the thing. Gil, would you go upstairs to my room? On the shelf, next to the window. You'll see what I want."
I nodded and hurried up the steps. As soon as I opened the door of his upper chamber, I saw what he wanted-a wicker birdcage. I laughed almost all the way back down to the workroom, but I was careful to put on a straight face before I went inside.
"I assume this is what you were talking about?" I said.
"The very item," Parthet said. "The bottom unclips there."
I took the bottom of the cage off and set it on Parthet's work table. He set the elf's head on it, clipped the cage over its bottom, and dried his hands.
"It might not be the most dignified setting, and I do apologize for that," Parthet told the head. "But it keeps you out of the alcohol and leaves you free to speak whenever you need to. And it will be easier to transport you like this than in the pot."
The elf didn't say a word, but I thought that he must be fairly burned up at the idea. I think I would have been, despite Parthet's apologies. The rest of us left the room quickly.
"Aren't you afraid that he'll conjure up some mischief in there?" I asked Parthet.
"No more now than he might have before," Parthet said, shrugging as we walked toward the great hall. "I have certain strong protections, especially in my shop. While they might not completely baffle our guest, they will at least make any mischief harder to accomplish and easier to detect. My magic may be infinitely weaker than his, but I've been in business a long time, and I have done a lot of my work in that room. The influence builds."
"I think we ought to put his body behind the strongest locks around, and keep a guard over it until we're out of here," I said. "I have the notion that if he puts head and body together he won't need us to get home to his father."
"You may be right," Parthet said. "That handshake of his was impressive."
"My hand is still freezing."
"I'll take care of security for him," Kardeen said. When we reached the great hall, he called out to two of the soldiers who were lounging around and got them busy.
Lesh got up from the table, drained a tankard, and came to meet me.
"Everything's ready, 'cept for what we'll need to fetch from Cayenne in the morning, our weapons and such, and a case of those magic dinners you got stored." Magic dinners-I had a big stock of freeze-dried meals. They take a lot less room to pack than real food.
"That's good," I said. "We'll be going to Thyme by portal and ride south from there."
"Into Dorthin?" Lesh asked.
"Not if we can avoid it." Yes, Dorthin was technically mine, and Dieth was ruling the country as duke in my name, but Dorthin wasn't entirely tame, and many of the warlords in the marcher territories of Dorthin were particularly independent… and hostile to me and to Varay.
The afternoon was just about shot, so Lesh and I headed back to Cayenne for supper. It would be a night for heroic pigging out, for eating far beyond the point of satiation. The four of us who were going on the road in the morning would all try to fill ourselves to the bursting point against the inevitable light rations of the next few weeks-or months. In the height of summer, it might not be as bad as it would be at other seasons. Lesh and Harkane were sure to know which wild fruits and vegetables would be ripe and edible, and we could figure on occasionally supplementing our stores through the benefices of some unsuspecting wild animal along the way, but there was simply no possible way to mount a lengthy expedition in the wilds and carry enough food to provide garrison-style meals for long. You hit the point of diminishing returns very quickly in the buffer zone. The more food you haul along, the more animals you need to carry your supplies, the slower you travel… and the more food you have to bring along. Supper, a bedtime "snack," and breakfast-we would stuff ourselves at all three meals, and try to top it off at Basil and before we rode out of Thyme. The bloated feeling we started with would pass all too soon, and we would ride with an edge of hunger until we returned to someplace with civilized kitchens.
When we stepped through to Cayenne, Joy and Timon were still hauling their booty through from Louisville. I let Joy hold the passage open and pitched in to help Timon cart everything through.
"What did you do, clean out the city?" I asked as I carried two cases of Pepsi through.
"I tried," Joy admitted cheerfully. "That was fun, a real binge."
"We filled up the wagon twice," Timon said as we passed, me going back for another load, him carrying one through.
"I got a lot of Pepsi and pizza mixes, and junk food and books, good coffee, cocoa, powdered milk, German wine, two cases of beer for you, and a lot of other goodies."
"What's the latest news?" I asked, hauling through the two cases of Michelob. It was in cans. I always buy the bottles, but cans meant that I could take some along on the road without worrying that it would get busted and wasted.
"They're tracking the radioactivity across Florida and they're burning thousands of acres of orange and grapefruit trees. They say that a lot more than a half million people were exposed to radiation at dangerous levels. The hospitals are all full, and they're rushing to get all of the bodies buried as quickly as possible. The UN Security Council is debating a resolution calling for member nations to take 'all necessary measures to eliminate the threat of organized terrorism worldwide,' whatever that means."
"It means a lot of bloody fighting," I said.
"Everyone seems to think that it will pass."
"Then you'd better be damn sure you get your family moved through as quickly as you can Saturday. Don't dally in Chicago."
"I won't. Oh, I cleaned the supermarket out of Hershey Bars and Milky Ways too."
"They'll come in handy. Chocolate's good for quick energy." I was quick to decide that we'd have to sneak some of the candy bars out for our trip.
"Powdered hot chocolate mix, a bunch of canned food, today's newspapers-USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Louisville Times, New York Times. This week's news magazines, and I don't know what-all else. Some clothes, shampoo, personal things." She hesitated a minute. "Gil, I think I spent more than two thousand dollars."
"Is that all? The way you kept listing stuff, I figured it would be more than that. But I didn't know I could get that much out on my bank card in one day."
"You can't. You had about six hundred in your wallet and there was a little over a thousand in cash in that lock box you brought over from Chicago, and I had some cash of my own."
"Don't worry about it. Money's no problem. I told you that. You could have taken the credit cards too."
"I didn't think about it or I would have," Joy admitted with a smile.
Timon and I brought the last of the loot through, and Joy let the doorway close. We kissed and then she started digging through all the stuff to show me what she had bought.
"We can look at it all later," I told her. "It's suppertime."
"Oh, I got a bunch of those big square batteries for the lanterns too. You said batteries wear out fast."
"If you want your Pepsi cold, you'll have to coax Parthet to come over and freeze a block of ice for you," I said as we walked downstairs to eat.
"I didn't think about ice," she admitted.
"We've got a closet fixed up something like a shower stall, with a watertight door. Fill it with water and Parthet does his abracadabra bit and turns it into a solid chunk of ice. Chip off what you need either to put in a glass or to chill bottles in one of the coolers. Takes about ten days for the ice in the closet to melt and drain away."
Joy kept talking all through supper, but she still managed to wolf down her share of everything. "Shopping makes me hungry," she said, as if living in Varay wasn't excuse enough for eating as much at one meal as she used to eat in half a week. She hadn't noticed the way everyone's bellies puffed out and then deflated in the hour or two after a meal-like recurrent, transient beer guts. When she first saw herself that way, she was likely to panic. Joy put a lot of stock in her trim fi
gure. So did I, for that matter, but I knew just how ephemeral the bloated stomachs were in the buffer zone.
I couldn't see how Joy had managed to buy everything she did and get it transferred to Varay in one afternoon. Timon said that they had filled the van twice, and they must have really packed every cubic inch both times. Of course, most stores would have help to get the purchases out to the van, but Timon and Joy would have had to unload the van at Mother's house, carry everything to the doorway leading to Cayenne from there, and then do it all again. Timon had already hauled through quite a lot before Lesh and I got back from Basil. There were ten full cases of Pepsi beside the two cases of beer and everything else Joy bought.
No wonder she was so hungry.
But the way Joy carried on at the table solved one problem. I had to talk with Lesh, Harkane, and Timon about our quest, and I didn't want to do that with Joy around, and questions would have been asked during supper if Joy hadn't monopolized the conversation. I also had to leave instructions for the people who were staying behind to make sure that things went as smoothly as possible for Joy. She had even thought to buy small gifts for all of the people who worked at the castle-nothing extravagant, but enough to let everyone know that she had thought about him or her. It's not the kind of thing I ever remembered to do. She must have pumped Timon for a lot of information, because she knew just who we had and how many children they had over in the village, and just about everything else about them.
I was impressed, and then some. Joy was going to make a very popular chatelaine at Castle Cayenne.
There was even a special treat for dessert, ten gallons of ice cream that Joy had brought back in a couple of new camping coolers. It was enough to give everyone in the castle a good taste with enough left over for the people with children in the village to take some home with them.
It was a jolly party, almost enough to make me forget what the morning held in store.
But then Mother joined us, just as the party was breaking up.
"Why didn't you tell me that there's a dragon flying in our world?" she asked.
"I haven't seen you since then." I turned to Joy. "Did you hear any more about it this afternoon?" She shook her head.
"Why is it so important?" I asked Mother. "I mean, beside the obvious evidence of how screwed up everything is getting."
"There are Varayans in that world."
"I know about Doc McCreary."
"He's not the only one. There are"-she made a quick, impatient gesture with both hands-"nearly two dozen Varayans, and their families, some from here, some from there. This dragon will have them in a panic."
"More than the Coral Lady?"
"Yes, especially just after that."
"You think some of them will want to come back here?"
"It's likely. I'll have to go home and call each of them, find out. I'm their only contact."
"Be careful."
"I'm aware of the danger," Mother said, coolly. Our relationship remained rather touchy. I make no apology for that. But we tried to keep it from completely destroying the family ties. It took work on both sides.
"Grandfather is still in danger," Mother said, changing subjects abruptly. "Frankly, I don't see how he has lasted this long."
"I told him that I'm not ready to take over his job," I said, softly enough that almost anyone but Mother might have missed it. She could hear a whisper through a chorus of air hammers.
"You can't carry him forever like that," she said. That started something ticking inside me. Mother actually believed that I had the power to affect Pregel, to hold off death. That she believed it was frightening. That she might be right was even more terrifying.
Mother was in a hurry to get to Louisville so she could do her Paul Revere bit on the telephone. Joy went upstairs to put some order to all the things she had bought. That gave me a chance to talk with all of the castle people and with my three traveling companions. I needed more than an hour to make sure that everyone knew what I wanted them to know in advance. The four of us who were going on the road would pop through to Basil at dawn and have our breakfast there. I gave Lesh, Harkane, and Timon a full briefing on what we had to do, where we had to go, what was at stake, and who our guide would be. Carrying along the talking head of a dead elf was the only thing that visibly bothered anyone. It bothered me too, but the elf was our only ticket.
When I got upstairs, Joy was still working at her sorting, putting the different items in separate stacks, but she had changed clothes. She was just wearing a bathrobe, loosely belted now.
"The bath water's just barely warm, but if you hurry you might get enough," she said.
I nodded and went on through to the bathroom. She was right about the water temperature, but it was often worse. Since Joy had braved it, I wasn't going to cheat by going to Chicago for a shower. I didn't want to give Joy the slightest excuse for thinking that Chicago and its world might be safe, not while I was gone. At least the water wasn't warm enough to let me sleep in the tub, and I might easily have fallen asleep in hot water. I was tired, and even more exhausted by the thought of the trek I had to start in the morning.
Why? I had asked myself that question quite often, starting as soon as I saw that all the craziness was building up to what looked like a suicidal mission for me. Why was I willing to head off on this impossible quest? I could have taken Joy back to the world we grew up in. We could have found a secluded place-too out-of-the-way for terrorists, far enough from any major target to have a shot at surviving anything, even all-out nuclear war. We could forget about elflords and chickens that laid dragon eggs, and kids who literally grew up overnight. I had the training to be a top-notch survivalist if it came to that. And it would probably be safer than continuing as I was.
The first time I went tilting at windmills it was different. I started out trying to rescue my parents from some then-unknown difficulty, then I went on to avenge my father's death, and other things got done along the way, by me and to me. I didn't even know what the hell was going on until it dropped right on my head. In a way, that was really an advantage. This time I had a fairly good idea of what was in store. The omens said that we were rapidly moving toward Armageddon or Gotterdammerung or Judgment Day or whatever; the End of Everything. If you believed the advertising.
I wasn't quite positive that I did, but the arguments were too strong to bet against them at house odds.
That still didn't make my decision to attempt something even less likely against longer odds very logical or intelligent, but it did let me sleep nights. Annick once told me that I did what I did from a sense of duty. The word embarrassed me then, and I tried to shy away from it whenever I could, even in my thoughts. I guess I still do. It sounds too abstract, too impersonal. "Duty, honor, country"? Maybe, but maybe not. Maybe I am just stupid or crazy enough for this Hero business.
Or perhaps it all came from a sense of family. All the family I had left was in Varay-Joy, my mother, and her kin. Dad was an only child and so were both of his parents, and they were all dead. I had never known either set of grandparents. Mother's parents were killed back in the early 1940s. Dad's died about ten years later.
Whatever. There was a crazy, dangerous job to be done, the kind of Hero-work I had been raised and trained to do-even if it was by subterfuge and deception. My decision to try was never seriously at doubt.
I don't claim that I was being smart.
"Are you going to take all night in there?" Joy called from the bedroom. I guess that maybe I did come close to dozing off in the tub, lukewarm water and all.
"I'll be out in a minute," I said. I toweled off vigorously, and that perked me up a little.
Joy was already in bed, the covers pulled up to just below her breasts. Only a single lamp was burning, and it was low. Joy and I made love, but I can't claim that it was my best performance ever, and afterward I did something I never do. I just rolled off and went straight to sleep. I simply couldn't stay awake.
When I woke, much la
ter, the night was at its most silent. The bedroom was dark, with only the faint glow of the clock's luminous face and the moon- and starlight filtering in through the window. Joy was awake, her head on my shoulder, one hand down under the blankets caressing me, stroking, teasing. I turned toward her and we kissed.
"I hope you were dreaming about me," Joy whispered in my ear. Her hand was still busy below.
"What are you talking about? I wasn't dreaming."
"You must have been. You got a big hard-on."
"I don't remember any dream, but if I had one, it must have been about you."
"You'd better prove it."
I managed to sneak a glance at the clock-it wasn't quite four-thirty yet-and then I did what Joy wanted. Five and a half hours of sleep is plenty for me most nights. And I would like to think that I redeemed myself after the evening before, even though I knew that it might be the last chance we would ever have.
"How long will you be gone this time?" Joy asked after we finished.
"I don't have any idea. I don't know how far into the mountains we have to go, or how slow it will be. Several weeks at least."
"You realize that if I knew how to ride a horse, I'd be going with you."
"No!" Since Joy didn't know how to ride, I could have avoided that, but I knew where silence or agreement would lead. The second part of the quest would be by boat. "I would never risk you like that, Joy," I told her. "And I could never take a chance of getting in a position where I might have to choose between saving you and completing the mission. The penalty for failure might be too drastic-for everyone."
"You let her go with you." She was talking about Annick.
"Not exactly. And it wasn't the same. The choice wouldn't have been anywhere near as difficult."
"You mean because she knew how to fight and kill?"
"No, because she wasn't you and I never felt anything for her like I feel for you. Annick was driven by hate, and all she saw in me was that I hurt her enemies more than she had."