by Lionel Fenn
She glared at him. "What the hell took you so long?"
"Nice to see you, too," he said.
Her feathers fluffed. Her voice lowered. "Do you have any idea what it's like having to sit here day after day, listening to the Robin Hood Boys' Choir sing every verse of every song in the known universe? Where the hell have you been?"
He cleared his throat, wondering if he should tell her. "Home," he said softly. "I've been home."
Her duck eyes widened. "Home? You mean... as in home, New Jersey? Tatty ranch house in the middle of the block? Home? As in that home?" She stood, her beak fairly quivering. "Home? Without me you went home?"
He tried to explain the turmoil he'd been through, the soul-searching he'd undergone, which had prompted the appearance of the Bridge; then he tried to explain why he had used the magical conveyance to return to the pantry, and to a life that, for him, no longer existed; he tried to explain that beating his head in with her wings wasn't going to accomplish much more than give him a monumental headache, but she refused to listen.
"Home? You sonofabitch, you went home without me?"
He crossed his arms over his head and waited until she was too wing-weary to continue, then told her what he had found. She didn't believe him. He told her again. She snapped her beak less than an inch from his nose, his chin, his right ear, until he clamped a hand around it and held it until her feathers took on a distinctive blue tint. When she slumped in defeat, he told her a third time, and slowly, finger by finger, released her.
She looked at him mournfully, and waddled off into the gathering twilight, while Lain and his men hummed a tune of heartache and sorrow.
Glorian and Whale came over to sit on either side of him, Whale shaking his head, Glorian staring off into the invisible distance.
"Will she be all right?" Glorian finally asked.
"I think so," he said. "It's a shock, coming home one day to find out you don't have a home anymore."
She nodded, and he knew that for a change she understood exactly what he meant. The village of Kori had been virtually wiped off the face of the Upper Ground in one night, the result of an attack by the burrowing horrors these people called pacchs. Only she and Tag had survived. And no one, now, believed that it was merely a whim on the beasts' part; it could only have been part of the Wamchu's vicious, long-term plan.
They listened for a while to the band of thieves run through their repertoire; then Glorian gently suggested that they all put a cork in it while she and her companions decided what to do next. Vorden Lain agreed and ordered Boole, his right-hand man, to send the boys out to hunt something for dinner; then he joined the others, not sitting but leaning on his longbow, his green hat pushed back rakishly on his head.
"It's been some time, lad," he said to Gideon.
"I know. How've you been?"
"Oh, a bit of this, a bit of that, you know how it goes. Poor old Croker tried to take over again, but he still hasn't got the hang of it." Lain laughed heartily, but quietly. "I expect that one of these days he'll either do it or strike out on his own, form his own band and give me quite a run for my money. A good lad. A little slow, is all."
Glorian adjusted her legs until she was sitting Indian fashion, demurely spreading her gown until it covered those parts of her that she didn't deem necessary for exposure at the moment. "We have to talk," she said.
"Aye, that we do," agreed Lain.
"Indeed," said Whale.
Jimm Horrn wandered over and flopped onto the grass behind them, and fell asleep.
"I want to know what happened to the camp," Gideon said. "And I want to know where Ivy is."
Glorian rolled her eyes in exasperation. "Typical hero," she muttered to the others. "Doesn't see the big picture, only the centerfold."
Gideon smiled at her as sweetly as he could. "I found your duck, I saved your ass, if you don't tell me I'll pound you into the grass."
"Burma Shave," Whale said.
Glorian fluffed her raven hair about her shoulders and smiled just as sweetly back. "I wish you had the power to see yourself as others see you, you worm."
"Burns," Whale said. "Sort of."
Gideon, in order not to grab the bat, clasped his hands in his lap and said, "You're despicable."
Whale frowned. "Daffy Duck?"
"I heard that!" a voice quacked from the other side of the meadow.
Glorian shrugged. "I care not what you think of me, so long as you think of me when you think. Which, considering the state of your mind these days, I doubt."
Whale looked at Lain, who said, "Browning."
Gideon sighed. Every moment they sat here was one more moment Ivy spent in the claws of her abductors, though he had a strong suspicion that she was perfectly safe, that her abduction was, despite Whale's earlier disclaimer, merely a ruse to lure him into a trap of either Lu's or Agnes's devising; but if that was so, he was fully prepared to walk in.
Brother, he thought then; you are out of your goddamned mind.
"Well?" she said. "Are you ready to listen?"
He spread his arms wide. "Though I hear the sound of midnight in your voice, I will ignore the last call of mourning and follow you to the grave, even though it means facing the blood wind of our enemies, listening to the soft whisper of the dead, heeding the dark cry of the moon, enduring the long night of the grave, and living a life of nightmare seasons until the day I perish."
He grinned.
Lain looked puzzled; Whale scratched his head; Glorian stared at the sky until, at last, she turned to him, slowly.
"That was Grant, and it's very, very tacky."
"Yeah, but it was pretty neat, huh?"
Her anger couldn't resist the grin, the wink, the raised eyebrow, and she leaned over to kiss his cheek. "You're a pain in the ass, Gideon Sunday."
He nodded, and leaned back as she, with Whale's and Lain's help, explained how, shortly after Gideon's no longer unexplained though still inexplicable disappearance, a great army of walking and flying things had swept down the slopes of the Scarred Mountains during the night. The battle had been fierce, and many lives had been lost on both sides. The fighting had raged for more than a week, with no quarter asked and no quarter given. The sky was dark the entire time, and a pair of slanted red eyes watched the conflict constantly, winking now and then, frowning here and there, finally vanishing when the Vondel brothers rallied a company of longhaired men and men who weren't really human, and charged the slopes recklessly. The enemy hadn't expected such idiocy and fell back before the onslaught. The camp, what was left of it, cheered; Glorian had gathered the rest of the army and ordered them to follow the Vondels into the Scarred Mountains' bowl, where to this day the fighting continues, at such a fierce rate that no one now expects it to last more than a year or two at the most.
"A year?" Gideon said.
"Of course, a year," Whale said. "Do you think we can wipe out this menace with one magnificent battle?"
"Or one ingenious swoop into the enemy's stronghold?" said Lain.
"Or one clever sortie behind the lines which results in the capture of the leader of their forces?" said Glorian.
"Well, sure," he said. "Why not?"
"Gideon," she said, as a mother speaks to a child who has gotten into the cookies, not knowing they are laced with strychnine for the neighbors' pesky dog, "the only way this can end as quickly as you seem to want it to end is if both the Wamchus are killed before they kill us."
"And if they're killed," he said, with an apprehension he was becoming familiar with, and thoroughly sick of, "their troops will throw down their arms and return to the Lower Ground forever, or at least until another leader arises to lead them out of their self-imposed bondage in another—"
"Right, right," she said hastily. "You've got it."
He thought he had; he just wanted to be sure.
"And I suppose," he said when no one else seemed inclined to talk, "that you're all here instead of there because you feel that you're going to
lose if that isn't done, and done soon."
"Lose?" Whale yelped. "Who said anything about losing?"
"I didn't," Lain said. "What I said was, we have rather a sticky situation on our hands, and if I weren't so busy training the lads, I'd be the first one to go to Thazbinn and do my duty."
"Thazbinn?" Gideon said.
"Well, I'm just too damned old," Whale said. "Oh yes, there's no question about my age. I'd drop from exhaustion before I even got to Shashhag."
"Shashhag?" Gideon said, weakly.
"I said lose," came a voice from the dark.
They turned, and watched silently as Tuesday waddled into the campfire's light, sneered at them as best she could considering the rigid lips she had to work with, and plopped herself uninvited onto Gideon's lap.
"Right, I remember that," Whale said.
"Leave it to a duck to see the future," Lain agreed.
Glorian folded her arms across her chest and watched the low flames for a while. Then: "She's right, you know."
"Of course, I'm right," Tuesday snapped. "You think I got to be a duck because I was a movie star? I got to be a duck because some bastard in a fluffy black suit knew I was special. And why am I special? Because I don't blind myself with fantasies, dreams, and pretty pictures of pastoral coexistence."
Gideon leaned over. "You got to be a duck, Sis, because the Wamchu needed a duck and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time."
"Yeah, well..." She shifted, wriggled, pecked his left kneecap for good measure. "You're still going to lose unless you off the Wamchus."
Glorian sighed. "There's no other way," she said, a hand up to quiet Whale's protest. "We can fight to the last man, and they'll still be able to send more against us. We have no choice."
"And that," said Gideon, "is why you're here."
They nodded.
"To pick a sucker."
They nodded.
"Whom you have already picked, and would have sent out long ago if he hadn't gotten sidetracked by going home and being an idiot and not staying there."
They didn't need to nod; the chuckles were enough.
He shook his head. "No."
They dropped twigs into the fire, rearranged themselves, tilted their heads when they heard the strains of the hunting party returning with their dinner.
"You realize that this is not going to be one of those deals where I keep saying no and you keep ignoring me until I finally see the inevitability of it all and agree."
They ignored him.
"It isn't," he insisted.
"Ivy," Tuesday whispered.
"Ivy," Lain echoed.
"Ivy," Whale said.
"Tramp," Glorian sneered.
"Shit," Gideon said, and picked up his bat.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
With a great deal of restraint, which even he in all modesty recognized as admirable, Gideon did not inflict a single injury on the woman who had slurred the woman he had decided he might as well be in love with since she was causing him all this trouble anyway, and it might as well be for someone he cared about as someone he only met on Wednesdays in the supermarket.
He put the bat away.
And he smiled at the greenmen who settled down around the fire with tales, and song, of their exploits in the Forest.
The evening repast, as prepared by a relieved Croker Boole who had learned he wasn't the one who had to beard the Wamchu in his den, was a veritable feast of culinary ingenuity, with a smattering of virtually every edible creature in the Fromdil Forest, and a few who usually considered themselves immune to the carnivores that preyed on their cousins. Whale, with a dexterity that astonished even him, conjured a smooth and silky mead to go with the meat, and it wasn't long before the Lain band had discovered the delights of barbershop quartets.
The night was cool but not cold, the Forest glowed with pastel fire, and the night sky was momentarily alight with a meteor shower whose greens and pale yellows reminded Gideon of a spring many years ago, when he and his girlfriend had gone on a picnic at a secluded spot on the Delaware River. He didn't remember anything else about it, but he was positive he'd had a good time, and the memory settled him into a mellow mood.
Tuesday was nestled against Jimm, grumbling herself to sleep about living on bread alone being a bitch when all she wanted was a halfway decent steak.
"A penny for your thoughts," Glorian said as she wiped a smear of cooked juices from her chin.
Gideon stared into the campfire. "I suppose, to put it simply, I don't want to die."
"Ah," she said, chewing thoughtfully. "Ah."
"Not a large request, right?"
"Depends."
"On what?"
"On whether you don't want to die because you're afraid of what the Other Side might be like, or you don't want to die because you know what the Other Side is like and you don't want to go there."
He nodded, sipped mead from a shallow wooden cup Lain had given him, and lay back. "Well, I don't know what the Other Side is like, and I don't care. I would prefer not to find out, except maybe secondhand, and even then I'll reserve judgment because I haven't seen it myself."
She wiped her mouth on a sleeve that refused to hold the stain, and took another bite from the well-done leg she was holding. "Ah."
"And it also seems to me that you people have put up with an awful lot from Wamchu, and I wonder why you haven't gotten rid of him already."
"A good question." She chewed, spat, chewed, wiped. "I don't want to give you the wrong impression, Gideon, but the reason is that we haven't had a hero before."
"You don't have much of one now."
"Not much of one is better than none at all."
He sat up quickly, cursed the mead that didn't move his head as fast as the rest of him, and looked at her. Was that a crack about his abilities? Was it a compliment? Or was it that his ears had a strange buzzing in them and he had misunderstood her intention?
"So when are you going?" she said.
"How about next week?"
She laughed, touched his shoulder, and tossed the half-eaten leg into the fire, where it burned as well as any rotted log. "At dawn, I suppose."
"I need my rest, how about noon?"
She laughed, touched his shoulder, and drained her cup of mead as if it were water. "Naturally, I won't be going with you."
Of course not, he thought; leaders don't go with the troops to fight the battles; that's why they're leaders—they're not dumb enough to expose themselves to possible death.
"As a matter of fact, it might be better if you went alone," she continued. "That way—"
"I'll die sooner, if I don't get lost first."
"Oh, I'll draw you a map."
He pointed at Lain and his men. "What about them? Why can't they go with me?"
"Well, I'm certainly not going to stay here unprotected, Gideon. My god, why don't you think!"
I am, he thought.
"Then what about Whale?"
"He thinks he ought to stay here in case we're attacked and need his medical services."
"Right."
"Besides, he's old."
Right; and everyone else is off fighting in the mountains, which leaves me with Jimm.
"And Jimm," she said, with an affectionate look back at the sleeping thief, "is my personal bodyguard."
Any number of snide, rude, crude, and telling off-color remarks came to mind, but they were crowded out by the realization that he was really going to have to do this on his own. All by himself. Without a single hand to hold when he got scared, without a single shoulder to cry on when he was terrified, without a single body to watch his back when he got into trouble. And he was going to get into trouble; he knew that, even without Chute telling him he would, and he didn't much like it.
"So," Glorian said with a smile that would have melted his heart had it not been moving around so much, from throat to knee and back again, "let me tell you what you'll need to know so you don't screw it up."
&n
bsp; —|—
There is a lot to be said, Gideon decided sometime between dawn and noon of the following day, for living under the heel of a tyrant. In the first place, you never have to worry about security, because there isn't any; in the second place, you never have to worry about where your next meal is coming from, because there probably won't be one; and in the third place, you never have to go looking for trouble, because trouble will come looking for you, sure as hell.
He stopped, pulled off a boot, shook out a pebble, put the boot back on, and stared up the road. The very same road he and Whale had taken the day before. Only this time he was alone. The others, true to Glorian's word, were back in the meadow, sleeping off the effects of the armorer's mead.
There hadn't even been a farewell breakfast.
Glorian had shaken him awake, showed him the map she'd scratched in the ground, given him a pouch stuffed with what she said were necessities from Whale, a kiss on the cheek for good luck, and gone back to sleep.
Tuesday was gone, probably looking for something to eat.
He rubbed one shoulder, his chest, the small of his back, and started off again. At least, thus far, the walk wasn't dreary. The Forest, even in daylight, gave off its peculiar glow in a most gentle and pleasing fashion, and several times over the next couple of hours he had to remind himself that he was, in fact, heading deeper and deeper into enemy territory, and at any minute he could be attacked by one of the Wamchu's minions.
Ten days.
That's what she said, he told himself.
Ten days, before the Day.
After that, it was oblivion and nasty doings.
The bat remained ready in his hand.
The sky remained blue overhead.
And though he occasionally heard something moving in the trees off to his right, there was no sign that he was in immediate danger of getting hurt. He supposed he was merely being tracked, followed, and reports on his movements sent back to Shashhag where his ultimate enemy was most likely preparing a most diabolical trap for him, not to mention an excruciating demise.