by Lionel Fenn
It was not, he thought, unlike a school bully who gathered to his side all the dregs and slime of the schoolyard because the dregs and the slime couldn't get friends otherwise. Until, of course, some kindly person showed them the evil of their ways and set them on the straight and narrow. Or fried them in the electric chair.
Eastward, then, and farther eastward.
The sun set.
They slept uneasily beneath a burning tree, which offered them no light beyond the light it had, which didn't reach them so they weren't disturbed save for the husking of the leaves and the creak of the bark.
At dawn Tuesday roused him, waited impatiently for him to eat a morsel from the pouch Glorian had given him, then flapped off to scout the road ahead.
Which curved, and straightened, and curved, and dipped, and rose, and Gideon availed himself sparingly of the sustaining mead so that his legs would continue to metaphorically devour the distance and shorten the time to that time when it would be time for him to take arms against the sea of troubles, and by opposing, and with a hell of a lot of luck, end them.
It wasn't going to be easy.
In spite of the mead, his legs were killing him.
The entire day passed without incident, since he wouldn't count the four attacks by the tooth-things; they had become almost commonplace, like ingrown nails and swatting flies.
Then, without warning, Tuesday called from around the next bend.
"Yo, Giddy!"
The bat popped into his hand.
As he slowed to a brisk walk, he looked at the Fromdil Forest and wondered how something so ethereally beautiful could harbor such horrid things as the tooth-creatures, such deadly forces to the prolongation of his already precarious existence. It was, he imagined, a system of checks and balances that he was not capable of understanding. A Mystery. As all life is a Mystery, until you lose it and discover that life is life, and death is death, and when you put the two together in the same room, all hell is going to break loose.
He rounded the bend.
Tag was standing in the middle of the road. Red was grazing on the verge. And Vorden Lain and his merry men were just completing the arrow-puncture of a tooth-thing that had been lured to its demise by a camp song.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I will think good thoughts, Gideon decided some time later, when he had gotten over the shock of seeing the greenmen, the lorra, and Tag grinning stupidly at him as if they expected yet another overwhelming display of his affection when, in fact, what he really wanted to do was rescue the tooth-thing and sic it on them, one at a time, while they were tied to a tree, with their boots off.
I will think good thoughts, even though Vorden had explained in a truly apologetic yet jovial manner that he and his lads had been unable to remain behind in the meadow because to a man they couldn't help thinking of him, all alone on the road, facing danger at every step, without some meaningful gesture of support from those who were experienced in this sort of thing—as though his time here hadn't given him anything but an ulcer and a desire to retire to the mountains and live the good life with his duck. They had, they explained, taken the short way through the Forest, a route Glorian had somehow, in her haste to see him on his way, neglected to mention, or to draw on the map, unless it was that squiggly line at the top which he had seen but thought was a result of her nervousness at having the gall to ship him out without clueing him in.
When he asked about Glorian and her protection, he was told that Jimm was still there, and Gideon assumed, without much hope, that the rest of the world knew something he didn't.
For Tag and Red, it wasn't necessary to compose himself. He had been right—after the airborne assault on headquarters and Gideon's mysterious disappearance, the boy had persuaded the lorra that Ivy needed rescuing, and they had gone off on their own to hunt down the miscreants and give them their due. Fortunately for Tag's future, they had failed; they had gotten lost somewhere in the Forest when Red wanted to try out a particularly edible-looking green-flame leaf. When they'd finally rediscovered the road, they'd come upon Lain skewering what Gideon was informed was a magrow.
And I will think always good thoughts, he concluded with a certain flair of magnanimous elan, because he was now comfortably astride the lorra, his feet no longer hurt, his legs were grateful for the respite, and his sister was off his back, in a sense, hanging out with the greenmen and teaching them the words to a ballad that featured a Cornish fisherman, his wife, a whale, and the kings of five countries who, for some obscure reason, wanted to hang Joan d'Arc for talking to herself.
Tag strolled beside him.
"Are you sure you want to do this?" the young man asked.
"What choice do I have?" he said.
"You could walk and I could ride."
Gideon changed his mind, and composed himself.
And it wasn't long, and too quickly for Gideon's peace of mind, before the Forest began to alter its appearance: the leaves burned with less abandon, and the colors that had defied the brilliance of the sun were fading rapidly to a simple, unexciting glow; the trees themselves grew farther apart, their trunks exchanging their rustic bark for dribs, then streaks, then large patches of moss that looked disturbingly like the unwashed hair of an anthropomorphic toad.
The air too had lost that brisk comforting chill, became damp and clinging, as if they were riding through an invisible fog. The sky's sharp-edged blue had dulled sometime during the last hour or so, and the sun itself had become a pale imitation of its usual, robust yellow.
No, Gideon thought, the Forestland just didn't seem to have its old oomph anymore.
"You know," said Tag, "we really ought to have a plan."
He nodded; the boy was right.
"We just can't go in there and tear them up unless we have some kind of plan."
"What do you have in mind?" he said, slipping his hands into Red's silken, and warm, hair.
"Nothing right at the moment. I just thought I should mention it."
He nodded a second time. "I thought perhaps you and Ivy might have concocted something when she told you she was going to raid the place."
Tag's brow furrowed in an attempt to remember. "Well, maybe she did."
Gideon allowed time to pass before he prompted the lad to remember harder, and preferably aloud.
The muted bellow of a magrow broke the silence, but it was a fair distance behind them, and none even bothered to look over a shoulder.
"Well," said Tag, "she did say something about not being taken in by that goddamned bitch with her funny-looking eyes and shit for brains." He blushed. "That was a quote. I wouldn't say anything like that. Especially about Agnes. Boy, especially not about Agnes."
The feeling, though restrained, was mutual.
"Then," Tag continued, "she said something about changing her mind because there was no way in hell we could do it without the rest of the army."
Red swung his head around and poked the point of a horn at Tag's shoulder.
"Thank you," Gideon said. "I was thinking along the same lines myself."
"But it's not my fault," the boy protested.
"What fault?" said Lain, who had come up on the left side and was swishing his rapier about to test the air's mettle. "Do we have a problem, Gideon?"
Tag, pulling nervously at his vest, repeated the entire conversation, blushed twice, and dodged Red's horn, which this time was aimed more in a thrust than a poke.
"Well," Lain said, and walked on in silence.
"I suppose," Gideon said, "it's too late to turn around and get the rest of the army."
"Oh, I would think so," the greenman told him.
"No chance?"
"Why bother? We're here."
—|—
Red protested with a threatening growl as Gideon's fingers took hold of the russet hair and twisted it, knotted it, pulled it, and otherwise made the lorra exceedingly uncomfortable until he had bucked Gideon onto the ground.
He didn't notice the imp
act.
All he saw was the plain.
Shashhag.
He nodded knowingly.
All this time his nightmare visions had not been visions of the mystical sort at all, but visions that mirrored an essential reality on the far side of the Fromdil Forest. Not that he had been aware of it at the time, but he was definitely aware of it now, and that awareness didn't make him feel any better about having had what he could well label premonitions—unless, he thought as he pushed himself to his feet, the visions of this reality had been deliberately and callously sent to him telepathically by the woman who sought to have his heart for lunch.
Shashhag: miles of utterly flat, utterly unbroken, utterly depressing plain. Generally brown, though streaked here and there with muddy yellows, blotched once in a while with shadowy greys, and marked on occasion with dots of moldy green. Not a plant broke the surface, not a rock interrupted the flow to the far horizon. The only features out there that caught the eye were the cracks in the surface—sometimes short, sometimes long, sometimes of middling length, none of them straight, none of them very wide except where they were wide enough for a man to crawl into if he were suicidal.
And the sky.
Gideon looked over his shoulder, and saw the bleached blue that only turned its proper shade when it touched the far horizon.
Then he looked overhead, and straight ahead, and saw that the blue had been replaced with shades of red, from rose to blood to almost black at the far horizon.
It was a desert without sand, a sea without water.
It was illuminated by a sun that was but a reflection of the true star, which shone only on places with more promise than this.
"Jesus H Christ," he whispered.
Red, his eyes an uncertain grey, pawed at the earth and kicked the divots to one side; his long tail twitched, his hair rippled, and his great spiraled horns seemed anxious to find something to pierce, if not mangle.
Lain, watching the lorra's behavior, sheathed his rapier and turned to his merry men, who had congregated rather solidly behind the thin Croker Boole.
"Gentlemen," he said, "I see you have made a decision before I have been given an opportunity to offer you that choice on the basis of my experience and rather extensive wisdom."
"We like to think ahead," Croker said with an apologetic smile.
"I see."
"You're not holding it against us, I hope."
Lain shook his head, and smiled. "Not as long as you're not trying some devious method of taking over, Mr. Boole."
"God forbid," Croker gasped, and looked to the others, who corroborated his sincerity with muttered protestations of their own. "We took up a collection, too," Boole continued, and held out a quiver packed with arrows. "In case you need them."
Lain nodded. "Very thoughtful of you, I'm sure."
Gideon had turned to listen, and was surprised to see a tear shimmering in the younger greenman's eye.
"It's not that we don't care about you, you understand," Croker explained.
"Quite," said Lain.
"It's just that it's so... brown out there."
"Indeed. The nature of the beast, as it were."
"What beast? There's nothing out there but brown!"
"Well, lad, it is the Shashhag, you know. That's what the Shashhag's all about these days. Brown. A bit of color for relief of the eyes. But, essentially, brown."
The greenmen mumbled.
Croker hushed them with a look. "What they mean to say is, sir, that we'll stand out. Like sore thumbs. We won't be able to blend in, as it were, the way we're used to. No sneaking about, and things like that."
"I see."
"We'll be exposed, sir."
"I suppose we will, yes."
Croker drew himself up. "So we're not going."
"I didn't think so." Lain looked at Gideon and said, "This is a habit of theirs, you know."
Gideon remembered. "I remember."
"They mean well."
"Of course they do."
"Not bad lads, not all of them."
"Of course not."
"Good." Lain smiled, and turned back to Boole. "Well, boys, then you'd best be on with it. No scenes, if you don't mind. I appreciate the gift. I'm sure it will come in handy."
Then they shook hands all around, and the greenmen formed up and ran back down the road, not singing, just a little three-part puffing from those who were out of shape. Lain watched until they vanished around the bend, shrugged, and slipped the quiver over his shoulder.
"A shame," he said.
Gideon didn't know what to say.
"They mean well, but I wish it had been a watch." The greenman looked up at the red sky. "Never could tell time by the sun. Not part of my training."
Gideon decided to leave him alone with his thoughts, and slipped an arm around Red's neck. "Well," he said softly, "are you going to head back to the green pastures of home, or are you going to stick it out?"
Red examined the wasteland ahead, checked the Forest behind, and suggested with a grunt and some nudging and a pawing of his clawed hooves that if Gideon really expected him to take one step out on that oversized dried mudbed, then he'd better lay in a supply of grass, easy on the weeds. Gideon agreed, and Tag, without prompting, took off to find what he knew the lorra needed for sustenance.
"What about me?" Tuesday said in her best petulant voice. "Aren't you going to have a touching scene with me about filial loyalty, my present condition as a duck, and your hots for the broad with the blonde hair?"
"You wanna go?" he asked.
"Shit, no."
Gideon crouched down to look her in the eye. "You don't have a choice, you know. I came here in the first place to find you, even if I didn't know it was you I was looking for, and now that you're here and I'm here, I'm not letting you go, so stop complaining and go help Tag."
"Very touching," she said.
"I love you too, Sis."
He rose, stepped onto the plain and put his hands on his hips. Though there was nothing obstructing his vision no matter what direction his gaze took, he knew he was missing something. Something was out there he could not see, and he knew he ought to be able to see it.
Agnes!
He snapped his fingers.
He couldn't see Agnes. She wasn't on the Shashhag the way she had been in his dreams.
As a matter of fact, there wasn't anything on the Shashhag, so where was Ivy?
Then Tag and the duck returned; Red was loaded down with bundles of long grass, hold the weeds; and there was nothing left to do but stall for the night, explaining that it was vital that they be at full strength for the journey.
No one argued.
And the following morning, Gideon was at the edge of the plain again, thinking that seven days was not a really reasonable time in which to expect him to sweep the world clean of most of its troubles and come out of it unscathed.
Seven years, maybe, he thought, and blew out a breath that told his companions he was ready to start.
He took out the bat and examined it for flaws, though he knew there wouldn't be any; he checked his boots to be sure they weren't wearing out in strategic places so as to hobble him at inopportune moments; he made sure there was enough life-giving mead in the pack in case they were faced with circumstances that required strength and endurance above and beyond their own fragile capabilities to provide; and he snapped at Tuesday when she told him to quit his damned stalling and get on with it or get off the pot.
"All right," he said decisively. "All right." He looked ahead, left, and right. "Which direction?"
"I doubt that it matters much," Lain said.
"No," he said.
And no, he thought; no, damnit, it really didn't matter at all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
"You know," Tuesday said from her perch on Red's back, "this isn't exactly my idea of a lot of fun. In fact, I had more fun at my last audition, when that slimy little director tried to plank me on the couch."
"It's still not too late to fly back," Gideon told her. "And watch your language."
"What language?" she said indignantly. "I was merely trying to emphasize my feelings toward the subject in question."
"We don't have a question, and you're making my ears ache."
"Your ears, my—"
"Tuesday!"
Tag giggled.
Lain averted his head.
The duck grumped a little, groused a little more, and when Gideon suggested a second time that if she felt so strongly about it, she ought to just take wing and bug off, she clapped her bill several times and said, "What, and leave you alone here? All by yourself?"
"You insult Vorden."
Tuesday allowed as how Lain might well be insulted by her exclusion of him in her description of her brother's company should she return to the relative safety of the Fromdil Forest, but she also allowed as how Vorden might be too polite to say what she had just said, and would relish the chance to return to an environment where he didn't stick out quite so much, thus making him a ready target for whoever might attack them.
"Red's red," Gideon reminded her.
Tuesday allowed as how Red's color could easily make him an inviting target as well, though she doubted it since his size was something all potential predators would have to take into consideration before executing an assault, especially when they got close enough to take a gander at his horns.
"Well, damnit!" she said.
"Not to mention Tag."
"Oh, shut up."
Tag laughed nervously, and moved a step closer to the lorra, who didn't mind the company at all.
They were walking abreast across the Shashhag, not bothering to look behind because the Fromdil Forest had long since dropped below the horizon, and there were no footprints to use as a guide for their return. In fact, it was debatable whether they were moving in a straight line at all. There was nothing to use as a goal, a destination, a guide, save for the cracks they generally ignored because they were too erratic and too numerous.