King of Swords (The Starfolk)

by Dave Duncan

  “Lie down.” She turned up the propane light. “Damn, boy, you need about two thousand stitches.”

  He stretched out on the bench and it felt good to lie down. The pain was growing worse, making it hard for him to think straight. “You got a needle and thread?” She was younger than he’d realized, with big dark eyes and black hair, either curly or curled. She wore jeans and a parka, open to reveal a checked flannel shirt. She was probably not much older than he was. She removed the parka and tossed it up on the bed.

  “Happens that I do, but I’m not a doctor and it’s not sterilized.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I don’t get sick—not unless someone tries to give me medication.”

  “I can’t stitch you! I know some first aid, but I’m no surgeon.”

  “Then watch me bleed to death.”

  She chewed her lip. “Rigel, the only disinfectant I have is a mickey of bourbon. And no anesthetic, unless you want to use the bourbon for that.”

  Oh, crap! His penis was getting excited by the exposure. If he didn’t end this conversation soon, he was going to get an erection, which would be worse even than the mauling. “Don’t need it. Honestly, infection doesn’t frighten me, but if it bothers you, boil the needles and thread and wash your hands in the bourbon. Meanwhile, I’m going to put myself to sleep. I’ll wake up in twenty minutes and check on how you’re doing.”

  She started arguing even louder, but he ignored her. He hunted through the forest of pain to find his point of focus, then began tucking the world in around it. He’d learned how to do that when he was tiny and had been surprised when Gert told him other people couldn’t do it. Twenty minutes. Reality folded and shrank and swirled down to nothing.

  “I’m back.”

  The woman yelped. “Oh! You startled me.” She held a needle and thread in her gory hands; there was blood on her clothes and even her face.

  He raised his head enough to inspect the damage to his torso. He hadn’t lost anything vital, but two of the scratches reached the edge of his pubic hair. Mira had stitched him up in pink and blue and green silk like he was an embroidery project. The bleeding had almost stopped, and his dick was behaving itself again.

  “Thanks,” he said. “That should do. I like the pink best.” He had the pain under control now. That was another trick humans couldn’t master.

  “I’m going to get jailed for practicing medicine without a license.”

  “I won’t tell.” He tried to sit up, and she pushed him back down.

  “Can you do that self-hypnosis trick again? It slowed your bleeding a lot. I felt your pulse, and your heartbeat went down to about thirty.”

  “As long as you promise not to hijack me to a hospital.”

  She nodded. “I promise, Sir Alien. What planet did you say you were from?”

  “I wish I knew,” he said truthfully. She hadn’t locked him in and started driving hell-for-leather, so he’d trust her for a little longer. “I’ll look back in an hour.”

  Focus…

  She had bandaged him up like a mummy and covered him with a blanket. Otherwise he was naked; he rubbed his feet together and felt the dried mud on them. She must have wrestled his dead weight around like a parcel to get him trussed up like this—it was intimate but not romantic, not even erotic. He was wearing nothing but his bracelet, and it would take a blowtorch to get that off him. Turning his head, he saw that she’d spread the ruins of his worldly goods out on the floor and the tiny kitchen counter: some clothes, a knife, a fork, a spoon, a groundsheet, a Swiss Army knife, a couple of cooking utensils, a money clip with twenty-five dollars in it. He wondered if she’d noted the absence of a wallet or ID. No shaving kit, either. She had brought in the folding chair and was sitting on it, thumbing through the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, but she must have been watching him.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Much better, thank you.” He could hold the pain down to a tingle now, and he’d adjusted to the shock. He was alive, whereas he might have been dead and half eaten by now. It was another memory he’d keep with him for life, long might that be! He wondered if the scars would stay, but figured they’d probably disappear like all the rest had. Even the nail through his foot had left no trace. “Thank you very much.”

  She brought him a glass of water. He sat up and drank greedily.

  She said, “It’s from the pump, but I put some Aquatabs in it.”

  She was still worrying. He tried a goofy grin that he was rather proud of. “I never get sick, not like you humans.”

  “The bear ate half your left boot.”

  “That’s what killed it, then.” He wasn’t sure what had killed it.

  “The bike’s been recycled into paperclips. Your sunglasses were smashed.”

  “I’ll get by. I’m still alive, thanks to you. Nothing else matters.”

  “And your guitar. That was my clumsiness, I’m afraid. It wasn’t the bear.”

  “Then you’re a better music critic.”

  At last she smiled. “You amaze me. And so does your taste in reading material. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Star Spotting for Beginners, and Machiavelli’s The Prince? You have unusual taste, Alien.”

  “They all came out of library dumpsters. Please don’t call me that.”

  “Sorry. Rigel? That’s your home star?”

  “It’s just my name. I feel badly taking up your bed.”

  Mira laughed. “It’s about time I had a man in my bed again, but I’ll sleep up there on the shelf. You do your trance thing, because it seems to help you. We can move on in the morning. I won’t leave you here to walk. Which way were you heading?”

  “Doesn’t matter. I’m a hobo. All roads are the same to me.”

  “I’m heading back to Nanaimo and the Vancouver ferry. I want to get an early start, so if you wake up and we’re moving, that’s where we’re going. Don’t assume that I’m trucking you off to a hospital.”

  She was watching his face. He tried not to let his fear show, but he had never felt so vulnerable. She joked about a man in her bed but she didn’t mean a freak like him. He reacted to human girls the same way human boys did, but the reverse wasn’t true. The only other person who’d learned his secret—besides Gert, that is—was a girl named Enid, who’d let him touch her breasts. Afterwards, she’d said, “Tat for tit,” and slid her hand inside his shirt. When she’d felt what was there—nothing—she’d told him that nipples didn’t matter on a guy but then the fun had stopped, and a few minutes later she’d asked him to take her home. She’d never told anyone, so far as he could tell, but that was probably because she was worried that people would laugh at her. My boyfriend the alien. Now he was completely at the mercy of a woman he didn’t know.

  On the other hand, she couldn’t tie him up without waking him and the lock on the door would be designed to keep people out, not in. If she did try to kidnap him, he could escape at the first red light, and he could run as fast on bare feet as he could in shoes.

  “Why a hospital?” he said. “Why not a TV station? Or Ripley’s Believe It or Not? Or the National Enquirer? They’d pay big bucks for a story like GIRL KILLS GRIZZLY WITH HANDGUN, RESCUES ALIEN.”

  There was no harm in letting her know that he could spill secrets too, if he had to. She caught the threat right away and her eyes chilled.

  “It was a black bear, and I have a license to carry that gun.”

  Oh, did she? A license for a handgun? In Canada? It was hard to shrug while lying down. “I’m glad you had it handy.”

  “An autopsy on that bear might be interesting. I’m pretty positive that the brute was dead when I shot it.”

  So he hadn’t just imagined it, then. “You accusing me of strangling it?”

  “When I went out to get your stuff, I saw that it had been stabbed. Right through the heart, I suspect.”

  “Yeah, sure. I ran it through with my trusty Swiss Army knife, which I then wiped clean and slipped back in my pack. Get real,
lady.”

  For a moment she just stared. Sometimes humans were hard to read. So were aliens—he stared back.

  “Let’s talk it over in the morning, you and I,” she said eventually. “I need some sleep.”

  “What time will you leave?”

  “Before dawn.”

  “I’ll be here,” he said.

  In fact he was down at the stream, naked except for the silver bracelet on his right wrist and a rubber band on his left. Dirt he abhorred—he showered three times a day when he could. His stays at Tofino and Ahousaht this spring had been heavenly because he’d had the beaches all to himself. The Pacific in March was too cold for humans, but not for him. This stream would have frozen a human man in minutes. It was a bit nippy even for him, but dried blood was utterly repulsive, and had to go. His wounds had scabbed over nicely—they just itched a little around the stitches—so here he was, sitting waist-deep in icy water, quietly snipping the silk away with the scissors on his Swiss Army knife.

  He’d always been good at moving quietly, but sneaking out of the Winnebago in the dark without waking Mira had been an interesting exercise. His every step had set the truck to rocking. He’d left all his possessions behind except for his soap, his towel, and his formerly-second-best-and-now-only jeans, so that she’d know he was planning to return.

  Sudden realization that he was being watched made his head whip around. She was standing on the bank in the predawn gloom, staring at him. “Voyeur!” he said, trying to hide his anger behind cheerfulness.

  “You don’t feel cold?”

  “Not much. Heat slaughters me.”

  “And you’ve healed already?”

  “Almost. I’m not quite well enough to try rape yet, but stick around.”

  Surprisingly, she laughed out loud. “Rigel, you are the most interesting b… man I have met in years! I have a couple of doughnuts, and I’ll make some coffee.”

  “Turn around,” he said. He rose, squeezing his hair to get the water out of it. He combed it with his fingers so that it covered his ears, and then fastened it at the nape of his neck, wading ashore toward the towel and jeans.

  Mira was standing with her back to him, her eyes fixed on the trees. “I believe you, you know. We can’t heal like you can, and we can’t turn ourselves off the way you do. You’re either an alien or a Superman.”

  “Flattery won’t help,” he said, close enough behind her to make her jump. “And ET can’t call home when he doesn’t know where home is. Actually my mommy was a Sasquatch.”

  She turned her head to smile up at him and did a double take.

  “Never seen white eyes before?”

  She smiled and patted his arm. “I don’t care what planet you’re from, you’re a nice guy, Rigel, and that’s what matters. Okay?”

  “Okay, for starters,” he said. “We are fully compatible with your species, earthling female.”

  She smiled politely. Human females had an infallible instinct for detecting male virgins, and he’d never had any success with pickup lines.

  Chapter 3

  As Mira was making the Winnebago shipshape, ready to roll, Rigel inspected the dead bear and even deader bicycle to make sure that he had left nothing that could identify him. His name had never been on the guitar or its bag. His blood must be distinctive, of course, but even if anyone thought to analyze the stains in the mud, there would be no way of tracing it back to him. His DNA might match with some X-File in the Flying Saucer Department, of course, but that would do them little good.

  The campground workers were going to get a nasty shock when they found a bear killed out of season with its brains blown out of its head and a bloody stab wound in its chest. Inquiries Would Be Launched. Even the Mounties weren’t likely to assume that the bear had been riding the bike and playing the guitar… or that it had somehow managed to shoot and stab itself. Small wonder that Mira was eager to make an early start.

  He couldn’t turn the brute over to see if there was a matching wound on the other side, but what he remembered was a sensation of driving a blade in about fifteen centimeters, not all the way through. He had had no such blade, and he would have written the memory off as an illusion, wishful thinking caused by the stress of the attack, except that something had obviously made that wound.

  As they drove off along the highway and the sky turned to blue, Mira said, “Tell me about yourself.”

  “I’m an ecotourist from Aldebaran Seventeen. Why do you carry a gun on vacation?”

  She smiled at the road ahead. “Fair enough. And it’s only fair to warn you that even being seen with me can be dangerous. I’m a private eye. I worked for a man who ran a detective agency in San Francisco. I fell for Micah’s line and married him. It went sour after a couple of years, and he’s one of those possessive types who just can’t let go and accept that I’m not his. I’ve had court orders and injunctions galore, but he knows all the tricks. Two of the guys I dated after the separation were beaten to jelly in dark alleys. Nothing was ever proved—either Micah hired goons to do his dirty work or he bought alibis, no way of telling which. He knows lawyers who make pretzels look like straightedges. I couldn’t stand it any more, so I decided to run. I came up here to Canada.”

  Her story was fishier than a salmon farm. “Is he so bad at his job that he won’t be able to track you down, then?”

  “He’s extremely good, but I know all the same tricks he does, because he taught me. I avoid using credit cards or cell phones or phone cards. I bussed to Port Angeles in Washington, and took a ferry across to Victoria. I showed forged ID, and they waved me through. I bought the Winnebago secondhand with the plates on. I’m driving without insurance, admittedly, but as long as I stay out of highway trouble I won’t leave tracks. I went to ground in Tofino for a few days to let my scent grow cold, and now I’m heading for the big city, Vancouver. From there I can fly or bus to anywhere, and he’ll never know.”

  “I’ll stay out of dark alleys while I’m with you.” Her story still stank, but she was the only lifeboat in the present storm.

  After a moment she said, “As soon as we see a restaurant, I’ll buy you all the breakfast you can eat. That’s a promise. You don’t have to sing for it, but I’ll admit that I’m curious about your background.”

  “Detectives are all naturally nosy, I suppose,” he said, trying to make it sound like a joke. He had never confided in anyone before, but she already knew enough about him to sell him to a circus and if she really was a detective, she might be able to help him track down his past, or at least give him valuable advice. The chance was irresistible—in fact, it seemed tailor-made for him, and luck like that always aroused his suspicions. I am the cat who walks by himself. Every silver lining has its cloud.

  “I can’t tell you much,” he said, “unless you want me to make up something about flying saucers or mad scientists. I was raised by a woman named Gert. Her last name was whatever she fancied, usually the same as whatever man she was living with at the time. One was called Estell and I liked that, so I kept it even after he threw us out. She was a prostitute and an alcoholic, a crackhead when she could afford it. She wasn’t so much a compulsive liar as one of those people who can’t distinguish between dreams from reality. She claimed to have First Nations blood in her, but she’d be Mohawk on Tuesday, Haida on Wednesday, and Métis on weekends. She was human wreckage, but the only family I’ve ever known and very dear to me in spite of her faults. She died a year ago, and I still miss her terribly.”

  Mira did not comment, but obviously that was not enough story to buy a decent breakfast. The thought of food was making his mouth water enough to gargle.

  “She claimed I was her son, but she was short and fat and I was always skinny as a willow, even when she had us shacked up with a john who could afford to feed us right. Her eyes and hair were black and mine are white. She’d never stay in one place for long, because she was terrified that some welfare busybodies would take me away from her. I’ve lived all over Can
ada, from St. John’s to the Yukon, but Gert knew enough not to try crossing the US border. I have no close friends, had no proper schooling, and wasn’t kidding about fishing books out of library dumpsters. I’m a graduate of Recycle U.”

  “Why did she name you ‘Rigel’?”

  “She didn’t. As soon I could talk, I insisted it was my name. I’d fly into tantrums if she called me anything else. She never figured out where I first heard the word. She didn’t even know it was the name of a star until someone told me, years later, and I ran home to tell her.”

  “So what name did she use when she registered your birth?”

  “I’m certain she didn’t register my birth.” He couldn’t imagine Gert going near a government office or filling in a form. “She could barely write her own name. If she did, she had forgotten about it by the time I was old enough to ask. She couldn’t even remember the name she had tried to give me.”

  “So you have no clue who your real parents were?”

  “Or what they were.”

  After a moment, Mira said, “What they were… You’re like that man not born of woman that Shakespeare wrote about.”

  “Macduff.”

  “Whatever. Where did Gert get you?”

  He sighed. “I have a million answers for that one. On Thursdays I was her love child, sired by the King of the Elves.” That was the story he’d liked best when he was a young child. “Honestly, Mira, she had more fairy tales than H. C. Andersen. One that turned up a lot, the one that I’m inclined to believe, was that she gave birth to a stillborn son. When she came home from the hospital, all alone and heartbroken, there I was on her bed, crying to be fed. It’s a variation on the changeling myth, of course, so you don’t have to put much stock in it. She could have dreamed it. On the other hand, if you had an unwanted nonhuman baby on your hands, that would be the kindest way of disposing of it.”

  “Would it? Would you give an unwanted human baby to an alien?”