Peter & Max

by Bill Willingham

  He drove past farmlands and through forested valleys in a pleasant, if occasionally frustrating fog of steady, low inebriation, eventually finding his way to Hamelin by late dinnertime.

  The modern Hamelin of the mundy world turned out to be quite different from the sprawling, medieval version of the same town of his youth, back in the lost world of the Hesse. It wasn’t just a matter of the streets full of cars, the ubiquitous electric lights and modern construction, though that was certainly part of it. It was more the attitude of preserving the old ways by fiercely embracing the new. When Peter found a restaurant near the gates into the old part of town that looked like it might provide a decent supper, he quickly discovered that there was literally no place to park. Parking wasn’t allowed anywhere on the street — in order to preserve a more picturesque downtown, he later learned — but there wasn’t a parking garage to be found either. Eventually a policeman directed him to the nondescript entrance of what turned out to be an underground parking facility where huge, computer-powered robot arms took his car and stored it in a tiny metal slot, which was one of hundreds of such slots in what looked like a giant, subterranean missile silo. The complex was more than twenty levels deep, and Peter stood at the top of it for more than an hour, watching in fascination as the robot arms slid up and down the sturdy central rail, continuously storing and retrieving cars, never making an error, never so much as scratching one of the vehicles.

  “I thought I’d be coming home in a way, but this version of Hamelin is no place I ever knew,” Peter said, watching the slots loaded and unloaded in a matter of seconds.

  “Excuse me?” the garage’s computer operator said.

  “Nothing. Never mind.”

  After dinner, Peter retrieved his car and drove to the hotel he’d booked the night before from Frankfurt. It was located just a block outside of the walled old section of the city, on the eastern side of town. It was a four-star hotel called The Mercury, and was reputed to be the most elegant place to stay in Hamelin. But, as Peter discovered when he drove into its lot, it looked like a jumbled, haphazard construction of a learning-disabled child’s building blocks.

  “Too much modernity for me for one day,” Peter explained to the desk clerk, when he stepped inside to cancel his reservation. He had the clerk book him instead into the best room available at The Hamelschenburg, a converted medieval castle, just a few miles out of town.

  “This at least resembles the other Hamelschenburg Castle I remember from my home world,” he said, while driving into its courtyard, with no one else in his car to overhear him and perhaps wonder at his meaning. “Maybe a touch smaller though.”

  That night Peter had trouble falling asleep, despite the room’s overdone luxury. After a time he gave up and spent the rest of the night writing a long farewell letter to Bo, in care of the Woodland Building in Fabletown, and only to be hand-delivered to her once it was certain he was dead and never to return.

  When he was done, he showered and dressed, carefully secreting all of his diverse instruments of death and mayhem into the various hidden pockets of his best brown suit. Then he checked out of his room, still in the dark hours of the morning, asking the night clerk to provide him with an international stamp and then post his letter for him. He retrieved his rental car from the very ordinary countryside parking lot and drove into Hamelin, where he once again surrendered it into the care of the all-night robotic underground automobile storage silo.

  Taking Frost in its case with him, he walked the half-block to the high-arched gateway that separated modern Hamelin from the oldest part of the town. Just at the first light of dawn, Peter Piper stood outside the gate, looking up at the bas-relief sculpture on the gateway arch over his head. It depicted an ancient scene of the infamous Rattenfanger, the Pied Piper, leading a parade of ensorcelled children out of town.

  In which Max perfects his craft

  and then visits Hamelin,

  where he does wondrous

  and terrible things.

  FROM THAT DAY ON, MAX LIVED ALONE IN the Black Forest, wearing not a stitch of clothing, and dwelling under no roof save the canopy of green branches overhead. His only possession was the flute named Fire, and if he hoped to stay warm, he’d have to learn to play a tune that would in fact conjure fire. Likewise, if he wished to stay dry, he’d have to devise a different tune that would make the rain pass him by, just as he’d have to compose a song of summoning, to draw the beasts of the woods to him, if he ever wanted aught to eat.

  “Why can’t I stay here?” Max had said to the Black Forest Witch (for a witch indeed she proved to be), when she’d ventured to turn him out of her home.

  “Because,” she said, “when you live in comfort you become lazy and indolent. The Max of old returns, the whining, human boy, who only wants all things to be provided to him. But when you face privation, when you’re forced to live rough, in the deep of the woods, the other Max comes alive. That’s the creature I want to know and encourage, the merciless beast in the night who never was a man but is a new thing all its own. That’s the Max that might someday learn to tame the powers hidden in Fire’s depths.”

  “At least let me take my clothes and my sword.”

  “Never,” the witch said. “You’ve accepted my gift, and all else belongs to me now. You may get them back someday, when you’ve unlocked Fire’s secrets. And even then you must first prove to my satisfaction that you can wear the things of man, and dwell among men, without becoming man again. Only then will you be fit to enact my chastisements against those who’ve so grievously tasked me.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “When has the passage of time ever mattered to me?”

  Max knew that there were some questions to which an answer was neither expected nor desired. He suspected this was one of those. So, with nothing more to discuss, he took up Fire and went naked and alone into the forest, where he lived a long time.

  ONCE A YEAR, ON THE EVENING OF THE HEXENNACHT, Max was allowed to return to the witch’s house. On his first visit he demonstrated how he’d learned to set fires and control the rains, making them appear and dissipate at his desire, all at the command of the many haunting tunes he’d crafted. He could make any animal of the forest flee from him, or else come to him, and sit passively, within arm’s length, while he took up a sharp stone and killed it for his supper. This too he showed to her.

  “I’m not impressed,” she said. “Where’s the true mastery? Why is it you need to take up a stone to kill and strip the flesh? Why haven’t you composed a more subtle tune that will not only cause the animal to come to you, but to expire at your feet, and then to be magically cleaned and cut for your cooking spit?”

  So Max went dejected back into the woods.

  On the second year’s encounter, Max showed how he could make a full, prepared dinner appear out of nothing at all. He sat at an elegant table, covered with a white cloth of fine linen, and dined on a dozen gourmet courses, served on platters of pure silver.

  When he was done, and the table and the silver and all of the scraps vanished into the nothing it had once been, all she said was, “You look silly, sitting naked and filthy at a fine table. Pick the twigs out of your hair. And is that supposed to be a beard trying to dress your chin?”

  And so it went. Year after year he presented himself at the witch’s house, but each time she turned him away on some pretext or another. Then, when seven full years had come and gone, Max returned once more to the witch’s dwelling. He was still naked and his flesh was pale in the moonlight. His hair was long and tangled, as were his whiskers. His eyes were dark and shadowed. He held Fire in one hand and it seemed by then to be a piece of him. He appeared out of the dark of the woods, but he didn’t knock at her door, nor did he call out.

  Sitting by her fireplace, in the comfortable chair of which she was most fond, reading by the fire’s homey light, an odd feeling came over the witch. She marked her place in the book and set it aside. Walking to the doo
r she said, “Be on guard,” to the fat yellow tom, with its many scars of battle. Opening the lion-headed door, she looked out to behold Max, standing in the middle of the road, regarding her with terrifying eyes.

  “I’m finished dancing to your tune,” Max said.

  “Then why are you here?” the young girl said. She sensed many shadowed things at the edges of the forest. Large and deadly shades, not entirely part of this world, lurked just out of sight, hungry, restless and straining to be set loose.

  “I’ve returned for my things.”

  “And so you shall have them,” she answered, “for you’ve finally become all that I’d hoped. Now, at long last, you can reenter the world of men and conduct my mortal affairs.”

  “Do you think so? After so long?”

  “Of course. All three knights of the road are still in Hamelin, where they’ve flourished, rising to diverse positions of power and authority over the city and its outlying districts, for leagues in every direction. My many spies have kept them under close scrutiny for all these years. They’ve each married and sired children, on whom they dote. And this is where my vengeance will fall, because simply killing them long ago wouldn’t have done. They wouldn’t have suffered near enough. Instead I will now deprive them of that which they love most.”

  “You misunderstand me,” Max said. “I was asking how you can still expect me to do your dirty business after so long. I’ve learned too much from Fire — perhaps more than you’d anticipated. Now I control powers and forces from far beyond the lands that we know. How do you imagine you can continue to bend me to your will? What can you possibly do to threaten me now?”

  “Nothing much, I suppose,” she said. For the first time in countless years, the witch felt the alien touch of concern for her own safety. He has indeed surpassed all that I’d expected, she thought. How much power is bound up within that one small device?

  “But here’s one talent I wonder if you’ve managed to master,” she continued. Her calm voice masked her unaccustomed anxiety. “In all the years you’ve played with Fire, and played upon it, have you ever tried to use it to locate Frost, and the brother who keeps it from you? And, if you’ve tried, have you ever succeeded?”

  “What are you getting at, woman?”

  “Only this: I know where Frost is. For all these years that you’ve been learning the ways of Fire, I’ve been doing the same with Frost, always from a discreet distance of course. It’s a wonderful and ancient thing and, for all its raw power, Fire will never be able to find it, because Frost, though less powerful, is more ancient and more cunning. Peter and his flute are forever invisible to you.”

  “But not to you.”

  “Exactly so.”

  “And therein lies our new bargain?”

  “You’ve unearthed the full measure of it,” she said.

  AT THE HEIGHT OF SUMMER, in the ninth year of its occupation by foreign invaders, a stranger presented himself at Hamelin’s easternmost gate and demanded entrance into the town. He was dressed in a feathered cap, a newly cleaned and mended suit of bright colors, over which he wore a long, pied jacket, all of which seemed much too much of a muchness, both in its riot of color and the sheer totality of stifling cloth, for this was a very hot day. But the man appeared not at all affected by the heat. He had long hair and a long beard, both of which were all a-tangle. And he had wild, angry eyes that were never the first to look away. He carried a long red flute and nothing else.

  “I’m Max, the Piper,” he boldly announced to the guards at the gate, “and I’ve come to confer with your town fathers.”

  Now, by this time, the freedom to hear and play music had been restored to Hamelin, among various other liberties. Things had settled down over the years, as things will. Day by day, and year by year, the townspeople gradually grew more cooperative, as they acclimated to their new lives, lived in service to their new lords. In time, the new way seemed to become the natural way. In response, the ruling authorities had rightly calculated that their iron grip over the day-to-day activities of the indentured populace could be relaxed in some areas.

  But Hamelin was still governed by a military bureaucracy, so there was a certain way everything had to be done. Those minstrels wishing to ply their trade in the city first needed to seek the proper permissions, pay the prescribed fees, and obtain the appropriate passes and licenses, from each of the many civil ministries who shared oversight of such activities. And all had to be undertaken with a respectable measure of humility and deference. One didn’t simply march up to the nearest city gate and boldly announce one’s intentions, demands, or grand expectations. It just wasn’t done.

  And yet that’s precisely what this arrogant, or foolhardy (or perhaps suicidal) pied piper did.

  Grubel Kaidan was a goblin who knew his place in the grand scheme of things. He was a soldier of the celebrated Twenty-Third Horde. And he intended to remain such, until a glorious battlefield death claimed him, or he’d reached the age where mandatory retirement would send him packing. He always did his duty, never shirked, and looked out for his troops as much as he could within the strictures of good military discipline. He made it a point to always know what his superiors expected of him, just as he made sure those under his command always knew what he expected of them. “That’s the only way to run an army,” he’d often opine. He didn’t much care for garrison duty, preferring the joys and terrors of frontline combat. But he did it, and without complaint, because any gob who thought he should be the one charting his own course in life wasn’t fit to be a soldier. On this particular day Grubel was serving as the Sergeant of the Guard for that section of the town which included its Eastern Gate.

  “What’s all this uproar about?” he said, when summoned to the East Gate.

  “These creatures are attempting to keep me out,” Max said, before either of the goblin soldiers could report.

  “Then you’d best be on your way,” Grubel growled in reply, “before I allow one of my troops to chop you into tidy pieces for the enlisted gobs’ stewpots.”

  Max only smiled.

  Without further discussion, he stepped back a pace or two, raised the flute named Fire to his lips and began to play a simple and cloying tune. Grubel snorted once and blinked hard and rapidly, to clear the tears from his suddenly burning eyes. He wiped furiously at his eyes and runny nose with one of his large, meaty fists. His two goblin troopers also seemed to be suffering from the same malady, as they too sneezed, squinted and frantically rubbed their faces.

  Then, just as suddenly, the awful feelings passed, even though the piper played on. Grubel felt fine again. In fact, he realized that, for the first time in a very long time, he felt truly marvelous.

  “Who was it you wished to see?” Grubel respectfully asked the piper.

  Max stopped playing then and lowered Fire once more to his side. “The top man,” he said. “Whoever’s actually in charge. I’ve no patience for clawing my way up through the usual layers of underlings.”

  “Then do please follow me, sir,” Grubel said. He snapped to attention, executed a perfect military about-face, and began marching off into the city. He marched proudly, happy to be of service in any possible way to this wise and wondrous man, determined to see that nothing stood in the way of whatever the pied piper desired.

  Max followed, after politely acknowledging smart salutes from the two guards.

  “MERE QUARTERS WON’T DO,” Max said, “no matter how lavishly appointed. I want an entire house, all to myself, and make it a fine one — the best that the town can provide. I’ll expect servants, including butlers and valets, maids and housekeepers, and coachmen of course to operate the expensive coach you’ll also provide. And what else? Oh yes, I’ll require only the best cooks, exclusive to my needs.” He could of course continue to magically summon the most exquisite food for each meal, but that seemed a waste of Fire’s many abilities. Each time he drew power from Fire’s deep well, it wearied him, often for hours afterwards. Better that h
e learn to save Fire’s miracles for more important tasks.

  “Excuse me,” Lord Diederick interrupted, when it looked as if the oddly dressed stranger seated in his office was about to continue listing his incredible demands. “Why would I even consider providing any of these things to you? I’m still not sure why anyone even agreed to show you in here.”

  This was the same Sir Diederick that was one of the three knights of the road, so many years past. But, as well as being a knight of the Twenty-Third Horde, he was also a Baron now, and in charge of the city’s civil administration. He wore a fine suit of imported green silk, which had his nobleman’s crest of vines sewn on its breast. In addition to Max, fat old Wenzel, the town’s civilian mayor, sat in the room. The Empire liked to leave cooperative local officials in charge, whenever they could, to preserve the illusion of local autonomy. Mayor Wenzel turned out to be so completely cooperative with the invaders that he was allowed to sit in on important meetings and even administer some civic duties on his own.

  “You’ll provide me with all of these things and more,” Max said, “because I’m a powerful sorcerer. I can do many things of benefit to you and your empire, and should be rewarded in kind.” Without consulting the Black Forest Witch, Max had decided to defer her vengeance, for a year or two, so that he could first sample the various luxuries that only a fine city like Hamelin could provide. She’d made such a point about hardly noticing the passage of time, he thought, that she wouldn’t mind waiting a little while longer.

  “But then you’ll have to wait all the longer to have your own reckoning with Peter,” is what Frost Taker would have whispered to him. But Max had elected to leave the blade behind, in the witch’s care, thinking that Fire, being so much more powerful, would be all the weapon he’d ever need from now on.