by Rick Shelley
“The telling takes time.” We walked to a bench that leaned against the front of the cottage. Mother and I sat. Parthet stood facing us.
“We had the call for help some three weeks ago,” Mother started. “Word had reached Basil that the Etevar had taken Castle Thyme again—a castle your father wrested from him once before. It was a direct challenge, a slap in the face. We knew it might be a trap, but your father left the same day. He had a good idea what he would do, what to expect. He did have more than twenty years’ experience at this sort of thing. He knew how long he should be gone too. When he didn’t get home or send word, I came after him. Only Harkane, his squire, was still alive. He had found this place and had started to carry your father here. They had been ambushed. Perhaps the attack on Thyme was staged just to draw your father, as we feared. The young Etevar held an old grudge over the death of his father. There were soldiers in Castle Thyme. Your father knew that, of course, but he didn’t know that there were more lurking outside, waiting for him. The wizard shielded them. There was a long running battle, but time wasn’t working right. That’s the way Harkane explained it. The Etevar’s warlord could bring out fresh troops from the castle and keep up the pressure far too long.” Mother turned her head away from me.
“Are they still there?” I asked.
“There’s still a garrison. I don’t know if the warlord remains, but the Etevar’s new wizard left before I arrived.
“We’ve had rumors of this new wizard in Dorthin,” Parthet said. “No one knows who or what he is, but the talk is that he’s a completely new force out of Fairy.”
I wasn’t sure what significance that might have, but I knew that my immediate future had been decided. Talking about it after the fact, it sounds like a moment of sheer stupidity, or some sort of cosmic hocus-pocus, but there was no time of considering options, no hesitation, and if it sounds like something from a bad movie script, I can’t help that. Back at Castle Basil, everyone had talked about me as the Son of the Hero. The Hero was dead, though. I had a new trade now—short-term, at least. In fact, my entire future might be extremely short-term. High drama. Stirring music in the background. All that hokum. A certainty wrapped itself around me and squeezed like an anaconda. Louisville and Northwestern belonged to a past that could never be the same. For the present at least, I belonged in Varay. It wasn’t even a matter of conscious choice. Maybe the decision would have been harder if there had been a special girl back home, but there wasn’t, not at the moment. There were a couple I might miss from time to time, but that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered outside Varay just then—at least, not outside the seven kingdoms. I had a score to settle, a Mission to complete.
One time, I asked my father why he had enlisted in the army on his eighteenth birthday. I had asked that question before. His usual response was that after years in an orphanage and in foster homes it was simply the fastest way out. This one time though, he hesitated a long time before he said, “I think I just OD’d on John Wayne movies.” That made a lot more sense once I knew what he had been doing in the years since he came back from Vietnam.
When I got up off the bench and looked around slowly, I think both Parthet and Mother saw the change in me, even in the new darkness. Parthet bowed almost low enough to push a peanut along the ground with his nose. Mother stood, straightened up, and nodded. Nothing was said. A few minutes later, Lesh led up the horse and wagon. The wagon was narrow and high, with a shallow bed set completely above the wheels. It looked as if it might tip over much too easily despite the reverse camber to the wheels.
“It’s sturdy enough, lord,” Lesh said. “It’s been well cared for.”
I nodded. “I’ll need your help inside, Lesh,” I said. It was too late to be starting out—twilight was gone, the night’s early stars were out—but I had to make the start regardless. I wouldn’t stay there, so close to the enemy. Lesh followed me inside. He knelt at Father’s side for a moment, then we carried him out and set him in the back of the wagon and covered him with a light blanket. Mother brought her horse, a beautiful black mare, around from the side of the cottage. She didn’t want to wait either.
“Uncle Parker, you’d better drive the wagon. If the enemy’s still about, we need Lesh mounted, ready to fight.”
“I’m ready for different bruises,” Parthet said quietly.
“I want to put some miles between us and Castle Thyme before we camp. Are we going to be able to get that wagon to the road?”
“There’s a path that keeps us out of direct sight of the castle, but it goes close,” Mother said. “It’s the only way.”
“Then we’ll have to chance it,” I said.
Lesh led the way after Mother made sure that he knew the route. Parthet followed with the wagon. Glory was tied behind the wagon. I put Timon up next to Glory, or as close behind as he could get on the narrow path. Mother and I brought up the rear, with her moving ahead of me when the track got too narrow for our horses to ride side by side. We rode ready for trouble. Lesh had his lance. Mother kept her bow in her hand. I left the bottom two buttons of my shirt undone so I could reach my pistol quickly. Parthet had his staff plus whatever sorceries protected a wizard.
The path was narrow but might have been designed for the wagon … or vice versa. We rode for an hour before we reached what Lesh said was the main road and turned away from the castle and what was left of the village of Thyme. In the dark, we had to ride slowly. I gave Lesh my flashlight so he could pick our path through the trickiest stretches.
I concentrated on sounds, worried that the Etevar’s soldiers might waylay us as they had Dad. We couldn’t go on all night without rest, but every mile we covered took us that much farther from the greatest danger. We finally left the road and moved into a narrow valley. We couldn’t get far from the road with the wagon, though. And there wasn’t enough light for Parthet’s camping magics, so we had to put up with the bugs. We kept watches through the rest of the night, one at a time except for Timon. We let him sleep straight through, better than the rest of us managed, I think. I hardly slept at all—again. Most of the time I stared at the sky and thought about times I had shared with my father, good times, generally. We had had a lot of fun together. All those memories … but he had concealed so much too. The secrets hurt, more as the night progressed. My parents had hidden an entire life, an entire world, from me.
When dawn came I was near exhaustion, but we got moving as soon as there was any light at all. The morning’s ride was silent. As the wagon wheels dragged mile after mile under them, the danger decreased, but I remained too lost in my thoughts for talk. And I was so tired that I may have dozed off and on too. At noon, we ate the freeze-dried meals I had been carrying in my pack. They didn’t go far among so many of us, but we weren’t hungry enough for salted beef again. That afternoon, I brought down a small deer with my bow, so we had fresh meat for the rest of our journey. It took three days to get to Basil with the wagon.
After that first morning, I learned more of my hidden heritage. Mother seemed to have a need to talk, and I was content to listen.
The title Hero of Varay was as old as the seven kingdoms. Varay was named for Vara, a legendary superhero who brought the magic out of Fairy and held the land for its more mortal inhabitants as king and hero. Traditionally then, Varay’s Heroes came from outside the kingdom. A Varayan might be King’s Champion, but he was never given the formal title Hero of Varay. “That’s one of the reasons we kept the truth from you,” Mother said. “Your father wanted you to follow in his footsteps—if you chose to. But you remained an outsider, even though you are also heir to the throne. We stopped bringing you for visits when you were five.”
“Why is it so important that I be both king and Hero?”
“The two have never been united in one man since Vara. Our legends promise a new golden age when one man can again hold both titles legitimately. It may be superstitious nonsense, but I don’t know of another time when it’s been possible to test it.”
“More of the same kind of legend that makes the Etevars want to reunite the seven kingdoms under their rule?” I asked.
“Perhaps. But Varay has never sought to dominate the other kingdoms.” Maybe not. Or maybe the Varayan storytellers were just better liars.
“What about the other magic doorways at home? Where do they lead?”
“All to places in Varay,” Mother said. “To Basil, Arrowroot on the Mist, Coriander in the Battle Forest at the edge of Xayber and Fairy. They lead to most of the important places in Varay.”
To the edge of Fairy but not to Castle Thyme? I thought, but what I asked was, “How is it done? How do you create a doorway?”
“The easiest way requires two members of the family, one at each end, linking their efforts through the rings, bringing themselves to each other. One can do it alone, but that takes longer. You have to go to each place and implant the silver, then you have to concentrate to take yourself back through the untried passage to make it permanent. Draining work.”
“Where does the silver come from?”
“It’s a seaweed that grows in the shallows of the Mist, along the shore of Xayber, in Fairy.”
That figured. It wouldn’t be anything convenient. “Do we have a stockpile of it somewhere?”
“No. The silver must be living when it’s implanted in the doorway, and it lives for only a few months after being harvested from the Mist.”
There were other items. Uncle Parthet was something over a thousand years old. There was nobody around who could say definitely how much over, and he tended to be vague on the subject. His first foray into our world was well before the First Crusade. Back then, according to him, there was little to separate the three realms—mortal, buffer, and Fairy. Technology was the distancing factor. Now, the mortal realms were slow poison for creatures out of Fairy and only reachable through potent magics for people from the seven kingdoms. And Fairy was consistently hazardous to the health of all outsiders. Even Mother was twenty years older than I had thought, nearing sixty-five. She could pass for half that, easily.
“We do live longer, and the middle decades pass more slowly for our bodies,” she explained. “When you were a baby, Grandfather could still lead his soldiers in battle. His hair was black and full. He had the stamina of a teenager. And he was already over a hundred years old.”
That led to another question. “What about me? I’m half one world and half the other.”
“According to Parthet, the blood of Vara always proves true.”
We didn’t speak of any future beyond our return to Basil. Until Father was properly seen to, the future had to wait.
At Nushur, people lined the road. We stopped at the inn for only a few minutes. The innkeeper’s lads brought out a small keg of beer as well as bread, carrots, and potatoes to go with our venison. The innkeeper refused payment. Dad’s squire had been through the village. The news had spread. When I shook the innkeeper’s hand and thanked him for his wares, he went down to one knee and seemed ready to cry.
On the road past Nushur, I asked why everything was so medieval, why it was always like that in the books I read too. “What’s so special about this stuff?” Mother didn’t have a ready answer, but Parthet did.
“Many people have had glimpses of the truth, or memories of it. There was a time when the three realms were so intertwined that you could go from one to another as easily as you can drive from Louisville to Lexington today. For a long while, there were no obstacles. But people re-create their past every moment, just as surely as they create their futures.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“You think that the past is rigid, unchanging history, right?”
“The interpretations may change, but the facts have to be the same.”
“Not on your life, lad. Both change. The past is a fragile tissue of memories—‘a lie everyone agrees on,’ I think somebody in your world once said. That’s very close. And when the memories change, the past changes. Some people have a greater control over their past and future than others do, but everyone participates to some degree. And the nonsense that grows out of people’s heads! Your father once told me that historians now say that Richard the Lionhearted was homosexual and blame the centuries of war and distrust between France and England on a lovers’ spat between Robin Hood’s king and Philip of France. Nonsense! And I remember King Arthur and his queen. Arthur was no miserable warlord the way they make him out to be now. Camelot was real, and glorious.”
“You were there, I suppose?” I asked, not even pretending to take this story at face value.
“Merlin was a valued friend,” Parthet said, ignoring my tone.
“If all the worlds were one back then, what made it change, and when did it change?”
Parthet took a moment to think about that. “You’ve heard of Carolingian minuscule?” he asked. The term sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it. “The common script you write in, the lowercase letters at least. It was part of the revival of learning that the man you know as Charlemagne fostered. That’s where it started.” He laughed. “The pen is mightier than the sword.”
People were waiting for us in the streets of Basil Town also. Sad faces watched our cortege. I had a little trouble dealing with the fact that all of these strangers were so moved by the fact of my father’s death. And everyone in the castle was out and waiting in the courtyard, even King Pregel. Dad was placed on a fancy wooden stretcher type of platform and carried into the keep by four soldiers. They took him to a small chapel dedicated to the Great Earth Mother at the side of the great hall.
“At dawn,” Pregel announced, “Carl Tyner, King’s Champion, Hero of Varay, will be placed in the vaults of Basil with the rest of our heroes, to return to the Great Earth Mother until he is needed once more.”
A vigil continued through the night, mostly in silence. I saw tears on more than one strong, rugged face. These were my father’s people, not the Hendersons and McCreareys back in Louisville. The people of Basil mourned Dad as they would a brother, or their own fathers. Mother sat next to the catafalque all night, her face nearly as rigid as Dad’s. I could see the pain in her eyes, though. I could feel what she was feeling. I could almost view the mourners through her eyes, and I knew it was a new magic holding me, not just some trick of my mind.
Parthet and Baron Kardeen went off together for a half hour about midnight. One or the other left now and then through the night. Virtually no one could last the entire night without at least one brief absence. The king didn’t stay, but he returned often. He would stand next to my father, put his hand on Dad’s shoulder, and look down at the closed eyes and pale skin. Then he would take my mother’s hand and they would look at each other without speaking. Once, the king came to me and clasped my shoulders. His eyes held a terrible grief.
A bell tolled in the distance before dawn. Everyone returned to the chapel dressed for the new day. Four soldiers carried the platform. Pregel and Kardeen led the procession. Parthet, Mother, and I followed Dad. Lesh, Timon, and Dad’s squire followed us. Harkane was fourteen, starting to fill out. The rest of the mourners fell into line as we followed a route marked by burning torches down steep stairs and along narrow passages below the great hall, through a cellar and down again to the royal crypt of Varay. Together in one long room the kings and heroes of Varay had their burial niches, the end of each occupied niche bearing a marble headstone with the name and dates of its occupant.
Dad’s place had been prepared. The soldiers slid him into it, and a mason sealed the headstone in place. A purple banner was draped across the front. Pregel stood in front of the purple and looked around at the rest of us.
“Our Hero is dead,” he announced, his voice echoing eerily in the catacombs,”but we have a new Hero at hand: Gil Tyner, Prince of Varay, heir designate, son of the Hero.” He looked at me.
“Step forward and kneel before the king,” Parthet whispered urgently. I did as he said. There was no time to th
ink anything through.
“Son of my granddaughter, son of my Hero, king who will be,” Pregel intoned. Baron Kardeen put a sword with jewel-encrusted hilt in the king’s hand.
“Hold out your hands with the rings up,” Parthet’s voice hissed in my ear—even though he was standing back with my mother, ten feet away.
I held out my hands. The king touched me on each shoulder with the flat of the sword, then he touched the edge of the blade to each ring in turn, starting a burning in my hands. When he held the sword sideways and touched both rings simultaneously with the blade, sparks flew from the points of contact, as if the rings were the poles of a car battery. It was an electric charge: I felt it.
“May the magic of Vara sustain you. May the Great Earth Mother clasp you to her breasts. May your sword never know defeat. May your soul never taste shame. Rise, Prince Gil, Hero of Varay.”
Pregel returned the fancy sword to Kardeen and then took my hands in his when I stood. There was an electric crackling through the crypt, a smell of brimstone, and it felt as if all the hair on my head and body was standing on end. Pregel’s eyes burned into mine. Then he released my hands and hugged me—with considerable force.
“We have need of a Hero,” he said aloud. Then he whispered, “We have need of you,” close to my ear.
While we climbed back to the great hall, maybe eight or ten normal floors up, I could feel the magic settling in my body—it was as if new parts were being put into place.
It scared the crap out of me.
8
Basil
Going from the crypt to the breakfast table didn’t blunt anyone’s appetite, but it did make for a silent meal. The king presided over breakfast in the great hall, something Parthet said he rarely did. Both tables were full. The lower table was positively packed, with far too many people crammed along the benches. But there was no shortage of food. Servants brought in platters, serving bowls, and huge pitchers in relays.
I couldn’t remember ever being so hungry, even though we had just buried my father. There was still no room in me for any outpouring of grief. It was just a thing that I knew would have to wait. Our meals had been rather skimpy on the road, and I had eaten very little after we got back to Castle Basil the day before—almost nothing through the twelve hours of the vigil and funeral. A memory, a series of memories, came to me while I ate. Dad always pigged out after his “business trips.” The first couple of days after he got home he seemed to eat continuously. “Gotta have fuel for the furnace,” he’d say, predictably. But the bursts of compulsive eating never made him fat. When he was on one of those binges, he out-ate me, and I was growing and keeping hyperactive all the time.