Trapped

by James Alan Gardner

  Gretchen ignored it completely—she linked her right elbow in my left, wrapped her free hand around my arm, then surged off into the darkness. (I, of course, was carrying her traveling case. It wasn’t light.) The way she pressed her body against mine could easily be mistaken for passion. Few people would have recognized the effort of a housebound woman driving herself outdoors by sheer momentum, clutching me for moral support. I could feel her shiver, though she was thoroughly wrapped against the cold.

  It would have been cruel to push her away, but I still considered it as we approached the gate. I hated the thought of my friends seeing Gretchen barnacled to my side. They’d met her once, when she threw a special soiree for them (“Phil, introduce me to all your widdle chums!”), and it had been every bit the nightmare you’d expect. Gretchen played La Grande Hostesse, determined to flaunt her wealth and pedigree; Pelinor and the Caryatid had embarrassed themselves by trying to act “sophisticated”; and Myoko and Impervia had radiated such pure contempt all evening, it was a wonder they hadn’t blistered the paint off the walls.

  As for Annah, I cringed to think of her seeing Gretchen cling to me. Gretchen groping my sleeve. Gretchen talking her baby talk, or gushing about some party she’d held for the Duke of This and the Viscount of That.

  Unquestionably, Gretchen would gush. She’d gush and twitter and fondle my arm in front of everyone. And I’d have to bear it. Not only did we need Gretchen’s boat, but I found myself in that state of endure-anything politeness that descends like a portcullis when you’ve separated yourself mentally from an old flame but haven’t yet told her you’re leaving. You’ll suffer any cloying demand for affection, you’ll be punctiliously attentive, because it’s your penance for what you soon intend to do.

  I wondered what Annah would think when she saw Gretchen all over me. I just hoped she wouldn’t burst into tears of betrayal.

  Annah laughed. Loudly. White teeth appearing in her dark face, lips opening, a surprisingly throaty chuckle. She covered her mouth quickly, but I could still hear giggles behind her hand. By the light of the Caryatid’s flame, I could also see Annah exchanging looks with Myoko. For a moment, I had no idea what was going on; then I realized Myoko must have predicted Gretchen and I would appear in exactly this way, Gretchen pawing me possessively. It was always the same whenever Gretchen met my female friends—she’d immediately make a big show of fawning over me, as if to say, This man is mine.

  “You took long enough,” Impervia declared. She probably thought Gretchen and I had stopped for a brief romp between the sheets; to Impervia, the world was a hotbed of fornication, always just beyond her sight. “We’ve already taken the horses to Ms. Kinnderboom’s stables,” she said. “And rubbed them down. And listened to Pelinor fight with the hostler about what kind of fodder they need.”

  “Please forgive us,” Gretchen oozed. “The delay was my fault.” She was using her charm-the-peasants voice—a tone of creamy condescension that was never as false as it seemed. Though she sounded phony, Gretchen liked people: almost everyone she met. Her mistake was thinking she could make them like her in return. “I had to get dressed,” Gretchen said. “Your mission sounds so important, I’m coming too. To help any way I can.”

  Out of Gretchen’s sight, Myoko rolled her eyes. Pelinor, however, clapped Gretchen on the shoulder. “Good for you—that’s the spirit. I assume your vessel is large enough to hold us all?”

  “Of course. Shall we go?”

  “Oh yes, do let’s,” said Myoko, making her voice as low and satiny as Gretchen’s. She slipped Gretchen’s traveling case out of my hand and tossed it to Oberon (who caught it in one of his pincers). Then Myoko took my right arm in exactly the same grip as Gretchen held my left, and batted her eyelashes outrageously.

  Behind my back, Annah broke into another bout of giggles.

  I crossed the grounds of Kinnderboom Cottage with women clutched to my arms. Gretchen spent the time quizzing everyone on their impressions of the Sorcery-Lord, but got little information in response. The Caryatid answered every question as if the Sparks might be listening: never speaking a negative word, praising Dreamsinger’s power and “force of personality.” Impervia, who usually loved detailing the character flaws of people, chose to be contrary this time and told Gretchen nothing.

  The only new data I gleaned from conversation was a description of Dreamsinger’s armor: a body shell made from glossy plastic, colored sorcerer’s crimson, and shaped to mimic the contours of a female body. The helmet had no holes for eyes or mouth...just a plate of smoked glass that offered no glimpse of the woman inside. The several times Dreamsinger had kissed someone—Dee-James, the Caryatid—she hadn’t removed the helmet, so no one had seen her face. She could still be anything from a bandy-legged twelve-year-old to a gray-haired grandam.

  When we reached the bluffs, Myoko and Gretchen were forced to release their grip on my arms—the stairway down was only one person wide. I made sure Gretchen had a firm hold on the banister, then took the lead downward.

  The canopy that usually covered the stairs had been removed for the winter. Therefore, we had a clear view of the lake stretching off to the horizon, glimmering with catches of starlight. On either side of the steps, tangles of thistle and burdock grew despite the looseness of the soil. The weeds had gone brittle in the winter’s cold, but plenty of life remained in their roots: they always sprang back when the weather warmed, and I expected Oberon would soon be down here using his pincers to prune any vegetation that encroached on the stairs.

  Thinking of Oberon, I glanced back over my shoulder and saw him making his ponderous way down the stairs. The big lobster refused to leave his queen unprotected among strangers...though at the moment, the greatest threat to Gretchen was that Oberon would miss his footing and become a bull-sized avalanche plummeting down upon us.

  But Oberon was sure-footed despite his ungainly size: eight legs bestowed remarkable stability. We descended the steps without incident and found ourselves on Gretchen’s private pier, facing the good ship Dainty Dinghy.

  It was not, of course, a dinghy...nor was it close to dainty. Gretchen’s boat was a full-fledged frigate, a former ship-of-war in the Rustland navy and decommissioned in its prime under dubious circumstances.

  Specifically: in Gretchen’s youth, when she was wild and adventurous and unafraid of open sunlight, Gretchen had wanted a ship. She voiced this desire to a Rustland admiral over whom she exercised undue influence. The admiral somehow arranged for the frigate to be declared “obsolete and supernumerary,” whereupon Gretchen purchased it at a rigged auction for vastly less than its true worth. Later, the admiral had been court-martialed, and it was now ill-advised for either Gretchen or the Dinghy to venture into Rustland waters; but lucky for us, the lake’s north shore from Dover to the Niagara river was Feliss territory. We were entirely safe from Rustland’s old grudge.

  Unless we were blown off course. Which I didn’t want to think about. Our streak of bad luck had to end sometime, right?

  “Ahoy, the ship!” Pelinor shouted. Good thing he’d taken the initiative. If we’d left the job to Gretchen, she’d have stood on the dock who-knows-how-long, genteelly clearing her throat until somebody noticed us.

  Two seconds later, a head poked into view above the ship’s railing. It was not a human head; since the light from the Caryatid’s shoulderflame didn’t carry far, I couldn’t see the face distinctly, but I knew it lacked eyes, nose, and mouth. This was Captain Zunctweed, an alien I’d met several times. He belonged to a race that demonmongers called Patatas: Spanish for potatoes, so-called because his people had pock-marks all over their bodies like the “eyes” of a potato. Some of Zunctweed’s pock-marks were eyes, randomly arranged from head to toe. Other pocks were breathing orifices, others were for eating, a few were for smelling or hearing...and the rest had yet to be understood by what we laughingly called Science on post-Tech Earth.

  All we knew about Patatas, one could learn from a brief inspection of a
ny member of the race:

  (a) They were human-shaped with two arms, two legs, and a head. However, they had practically no torso— their legs came up almost to their armpits, giving them a gangling gawky appearance but truly astonishing speed when they chose to run.

  (b) Despite their sprinting prowess, Patatas never ran when they could walk, and never walked when they could lie in a hammock, bawling out orders.

  (c) It took bitter cold or heat before Patatas would wear clothing. Quite simply, they liked showing off their unclad bodies. And no two members of their race had anything close to the same skin coloration—I’d seen one covered with swirls of lurid red and orange, another who was eye-watering turquoise with zebra stripes of mauve, and a third whom I might describe as “reverse cheetah”: dark brown with flaming yellow spots.

  Captain Zunctweed was mostly white with smears of soft green on his elbows, knees, and other major joints. Oberon claimed that Zunctweed “enhanced” his true coloration by rubbing himself with grass...but given the time of year, he hadn’t had access to green grass for several months, so at the moment he was au naturel.

  Zunctweed folded his hands resignedly on the deck-rail in front of him and looked down on us like a dignified grandfather interrupted by noisy brats. This was quite a trick, considering that he had no facial features to give this impression. Still, the collection of flecks and divots on his cranium radiated aggrieved forbearance. “Yes?”

  The alien’s voice was a chorus of whispers—his multiple mouths talking simultaneously, saying the same words. I theorized that each breathing orifice on his body had its own small-scale lungs; no single mouth could draw enough air to achieve significant speech volume, but acting together, they could make themselves heard. I’d always had a modest desire to dissect Zunctweed and see if my theory was correct...but like my other vague notions for Scientific Research, nothing had ever come of it.

  “Good evening, captain,” Gretchen said. “We’re here to go for a sail.”

  “A sail?” Zunctweed repeated the words as if he’d never heard them before. “A sail. A sail. No one informed us of any sail.” He gravely turned to speak with someone behind him on deck. “Have we received any memoranda concerning a sail?”

  He was answered by a high-pitched chitter. That had to come from a member of Dinghy’s crew—aliens called NikNiks, like rhesus monkeys but as smart as human five-year-olds. They understood English, but didn’t speak it; their mouths couldn’t shape the words. Instead, they talked in high-pitched squirrellike tirades. Zunctweed claimed to understand them perfectly...and since nobody else could comprehend a syllable, he’d become captain: the only slave in Gretchen’s possession who could converse with both humans and the crew.

  “Zunctweed,” Gretchen said, “you haven’t heard about this trip because I just decided on the spur of the moment. Wild and spontaneous...that’s how I am.”

  She smiled prettily. With dimples. Gretchen could make her dimples appear at will.

  “Ah,” replied Zunctweed. “Wild and spontaneous. I see. Gaiety. Song-and-dance. Here we go round the mulberry bush. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. All very well for some people—those who can afford to leap before they look. Still, at your age, one might expect such thoughtless frivolity would have begun to taper off.”

  Gretchen gasped in outrage. Oberon clacked his pincers. “Zunctweed! You’re talking to our mistress.”

  “Our mistress?” Zunctweed repeated. “Our mistress? You may have the pleasure of such a relationship, Oberon, but Ms. Kinnderboom is not my mistress, she is merely my owner. A subtle distinction, but there it is. Whatever gratification you find in being a slave, I am only kept here by sorcery.”

  “Captain Zunctweed,” Gretchen said sharply, “I’m aware you dislike your position in my household. But you work for me and you’ll take my orders. I’ve decided to sail to Niagara Falls; that’s all you need to know.”

  “That’s it, is it? All I need to know. Well.” Zunctweed spoke with half his mouths while the other mouths heaved ostentatious sighs. “Then I don’t need to know how long it takes to make a boat shipshape after long periods of disuse? Years when you were too busy with parties and fine food and umty-tiddly to care about basic nautical maintenance? And that’s not to mention the winter just past. It’s a good thing I don’t need to know how hard winter is on a ship. When the lake freezes and ice crushes against the hull—”

  “Captain,” Gretchen interrupted, “the boat was not locked in by ice. You took it into the middle of the lake where the water doesn’t freeze, and you sailed around doing God knows what for most of the winter. Probably smuggling and piracy.”

  “Smuggling and piracy? I see. I’m a smuggler and a pirate. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of contraband rum. Dancing the hornpipe on a dead man’s chest.” Zunctweed made a pathetic attempt at capering, waving his arms ponderously. “Tra-la-la, I’m a jolly buccaneer.”

  “The point is” Gretchen said, “you’ve been using the Dinghy for months. I’m sure it’s perfectly ready to sail.”

  “And in all those months, could it be we used no provisions? Yes, that must be it: we weren’t supposed to eat. And now you think our larders are brimming with venison and lark’s tongue, not to mention mangoes and kiwis and amusingly shaped rutabagas...”

  “Quiet!” Gretchen snapped. “We’re going to Niagara Falls! A mere ten hours away. Neither you nor your crew will starve in that time, even if you have run out of food, which I strongly doubt. And if we do find ourselves maddened by hunger, I know whom we’ll kill and eat first.”

  “Oh. So it’s come down to threats. The owner/slave relationship laid bare. Well. There it is. Never mind that one of my hearts is shutting down. I’m supposed to soldier on obediently, even if I’m too blinded by pain to navigate and we all end up on the rocks. Being wild and spontaneous is so much more important than responsible maritime practice...”

  Beside me, Impervia moved. I’d expected it sooner than this, but perhaps she’d needed time to figure how to board the ship. The Dinghy was a sizable vessel, not a modest yacht or pleasure craft. Its deck was two stories above us; its hull was a solid wood wall along the side of the pier, and there was no gangplank to welcome guests. There were no rope ladders either, nor chains, nor any other accoutrements someone might scurry up. Even the ropes securing the boat to the dock had big wooden funnels clamped around them, mouths facing toward us: obviously the funnels were attached to prevent anyone from clambering up to the deck. I wondered if these were normal precautions, or if Zunctweed had some special reason for sealing off the ship.

  Impervia was going to find out. She crossed the dock and whispered into Myoko’s ear. Myoko nodded. Pelinor and the Caryatid stepped back to give more room—they knew what was coming. While Gretchen and Zunctweed continued their verbal fencing, Myoko’s hair rose...and a moment later, Impervia rose too, lifted by telekinesis for the second time that night.

  Zunctweed didn’t notice until she was level with the deck. The captain only had time to say, “Bother!” Then Impervia was over the railing and landing with a thunk.

  “Good evening, sinner.”

  Zunctweed ran. It was futile, considering he was stuck on a ship with nowhere to go...but he gave it his best, fleeing from Impervia with the inhuman speed of his overlength legs. Impervia chased him anyway, both of them disappearing from view, their footsteps echoing across the timbers. I could track the sound as they raced below decks, then a door slammed: probably Zunctweed locking himself inside the captain’s cabin. Five seconds later came another slam, which I took to be Impervia kicking the door off its hinges. Squeals ensued, then bumps and thumps.

  A fight. Impervia had got into a fight. How astonishing.

  “Perhaps,” said Pelinor, drawing his cutlass, “I’d better go up there too. Myoko, if you’d please...”

  With a running start, he leapt energetically toward the deck. It was the old knight’s way of being helpful—the few times he’d needed a telekinetic pick-m
e-up during street fights, Pelinor always made an effort to jump so Myoko didn’t have to lift him as far. She’d given up trying to explain he was just making things more difficult: forcing her to snatch a moving target. On occasion, she just hadn’t caught him, whether because she wasn’t ready or because she wanted to teach him a lesson; once or twice, he’d landed amidst a flurry of fists, taking punches till Myoko deigned to spirit him away. This time, however, Pelinor stood to suffer more than bruises: he’d hurled himself toward the boat at top speed. If Myoko didn’t nab him, he’d whack against the Dinghy’s side, then fall into the narrow gap between ship and pier—down into cold winter water, dredged deep enough to float a frigate. Prime potential for drowning. Not to mention the rocking of the waves might crush him between the boat and the dock’s pilings.

  I had a split-second to glance at Myoko. Her hair had returned to normal since lifting Impervia—no static-electric spread, just a little residual puffiness. She growled in exasperation, “Pelinor!” Then the knight soared upward, over the Dinghy’s side-rail, and onto the deck’s solid planks.

  Myoko’s hair didn’t move at all.

  Pelinor disappeared in the direction Zunctweed and Impervia had gone. I ignored him. Instead I stared at Myoko. “You just lifted Pelinor, but your hair didn’t—”

  “Shush! Just shush.” She glanced furtively at the others. The Caryatid, Gretchen, and Oberon were busy trying to see up to the deck; Annah stood apart from them, hidden in her cloak, almost invisible in the dark. I didn’t know if fading into the background was just a reflex for her or if Annah was deliberately making herself inconspicuous.

  Myoko looked at them all for a few moments, then turned back to me with a scowl. The scowl lasted a long ten seconds...then faded into a sigh. In the cold night air, the sigh billowed clouds of steam.