The Hero King

by Rick Shelley

  “And there’s nowhere to hide, no place we can go to get away from it.”

  “Look, I know it all sounds crazy, that we’re dealing with legends—myths—that got started so long ago that the big power in our world was the Egypt of the pharaohs, but everything so far has checked out,” I said. “The odds are too heavy to hope that the threat isn’t real.”

  I got up and started pacing. But before I could carry on with my ranting, there was a knock at the door and Lesh announced that supper was waiting.

  “We’re coming, just a minute,” I called out. Then, more softly, so only Joy could hear me, I said, “But I’ve got to find a way to make sure our baby has a world to come into.”

  “A world?” Joy asked, getting up from the window seat.

  I shrugged, hurried into clothes, ran my hands through my hair, and gestured toward the door.

  “You’re going down to eat looking like that?” Joy asked. “You’re the king now—you can’t run around looking like a bum.”

  T-shirt and blue jeans. I guess she was right, but I had just pulled on the first clothes that came to hand. I hurried to get myself presentable, and we went down to dinner.

  Dinner was another ordeal, with everyone treating me different just because I was suddenly king. There was bowing and an overabundance of titles. I was glad when the meal was over. I was near the boiling point by then, but I knew that I couldn’t take out my frustration on the people of my household.

  “I’ve got to get away for a little bit,” I told Joy when we went back upstairs. We went all of the way up to the parapets. Autumn had come to Varay. The evening was quite cool, but after the stuffy warmth of the great hall, that can be refreshing. At least there were no dragons hanging about overhead.

  “Chicago?” Joy asked. “You’ve got those Russians to take back.”

  “Maybe, but not yet.” I did have to get the Russians out of the way as soon as possible, and I didn’t know anywhere but the other world where I could go to get away from the hoopla. But I also wasn’t sure that I would be able go back to Chicago, or anywhere back in that world, ever. A memory: when I suggested that we take Pregel to that world to get him to a modern hospital, Mother said that it was impossible, that Pregel was so tied to the magic of the buffer zone that it would kill him to take him to the world I had been born in.

  “Where else can we go?” Joy asked.

  I took her in my arms. “I’m not talking about anything major yet, love,” I said. “I just have to get off by myself for a couple of hours. Not we,” I added as softly as I could. I kissed her. “I’ve got to find some way to come to grips with this.”

  Then I knew where I would go—whether it was the best place or not, the same place I always went to sort things out in my head in Varay, the crypt under Castle Basil. I had two people there to talk to now, maybe three. When the apparition of the Great Earth Mother confronted me in her shrine out on the Mist, she had initially mistaken me for Vara. “Vara, have you returned at last?” she asked me. That was another bit of legend that I was going to have to have somebody check on. If there was time.

  “I think we both need a few hours alone,” I told Joy. “It’s a big change for both of us.”

  “I’ve had too many hours alone lately,” Joy said, turning away from me for a moment. She took a couple of steps away, then turned back to face me.

  “We got married, or have you forgotten that? You’ve been off on these damned quests, one after the other. I’m just someone you come to see for a few hours between adventures.” She walked off to the other side of the tower.

  “It has been like that,” I agreed, following about halfway. The word “damned” coming from her was a pretty clear danger signal. Joy rarely used anything stronger than “dam,” and she didn’t use that often. “I’m not thrilled about it either. There’s nothing I’d like better than a chance for the two of us to go off somewhere all alone together. A proper honeymoon, if nothing else.”

  “But we can’t, not yet?”

  “Not yet.” I shook my head. “If it’s at all possible, we’ll go lock ourselves away in the apartment in Chicago for a couple of days before the next round. Hey, I may not even have to go anywhere for this last part, if we ever find out what to do. It may be something as simple as performing some kind of ritual with the balls of the Great Earth Mother, some bit of conjuring that can be done right in Castle Basil.”

  Joy walked partway back to me. “Go on. Go get your brooding over with.” She didn’t sound angry, just sad. About the way I felt.

  “A couple of hours,” I said. “It shouldn’t be longer than that. I just need time to sort through everything in my head.”

  “I know.” She came the rest of the way to me. “You really cared for Pregel, didn’t you?”

  “Very much,” I said. “And I really didn’t want to get us tied down in his job this soon. I thought we’d have a few years of the simple life here first.”

  “Go on, get going. The sooner you leave, the sooner you’ll be back. I think I’ll stay up here for a while.”

  I knew I had to leave, but I hesitated. I took Joy in my arms and we hugged with something that may have been very close to desperation.

  And then I left quickly.

  Somehow, I managed to get down to the doorway to Castle Basil and out of Cayenne without running into anyone. My leaving without some sort of entourage would have shocked all of the Varayans no end. At Basil, I couldn’t escape notice for long, but only soldiers and servants saw me before I got to the stairs leading down to the crypt. That would give me the time alone I needed. Baron Kardeen would learn that I was in the castle. He always seemed to know who was around, within minutes of anyone’s arrival or departure. It wasn’t that he had magical means of discovering who came and went, it was just that he had the staff well trained, and decades of practice.

  There are a lot of stairs to cover to get down to the crypt, more than a hundred of them, about eight stories worth. The steps are wide and shallow, running back and forth in straight flights past the cellars and on down into the heart of Basil Rock itself. According to local legend (and in a place like Varay, local legends have something to say about everything), Basil Rock is the hub of the universe, the center of all creation—all three realms of being: mortal, buffer, and fairy.

  There are no banisters along the stairway, and you can look down between the flights of stairs, all the way to the bottom. But most people stay close to the wall side of the stairs, and few care to look down.

  Going down is easy. Coming back up can be a pain.

  The stairs and crypt are always well lit. Torches are kept in sconces along the walls at intervals. The duty guards maintain them, and in my years in the kingdom, I had never come across a burned-out torch along the route. They burn almost smokelessly, and there is just enough ventilation through the center of the stairwell and through air shafts bored through to the outside to keep the crypt from claiming new residents for itself with a buildup of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide.

  King Pregel’s headstone was already mortared in place, with his name and dates freshly carved on it. Wellivazey’s body had been returned to the room also. Despite the months the elf had been dead, there had been no decomposition.

  I stopped by my father’s niche first, at the end of the Heroes’ section of the burial wall, near the door, nearly eighty feet from Pregel’s place.

  “You’ve got someone down here to talk to now, someone you knew, though you might have to shout at each other to be heard,” I said. I had my hand resting on the marble capstone, the way I usually stood during those one-sided chats. I may have been heavily into the Hamlet routine, but I wouldn’t say that I ever really heard Dad talking back to me in one of those sessions. My father, Carl Tyner, Hero of Varay before me … why would he talk to me about Varay’s problems now? He had never said one word to me about the kingdom or his “job” while he was alive. I usually didn’t feel the same sharp resentment against him that I still held agai
nst Mother, though. Sure, he was equally to blame, but my soliloquies had eased my anger toward him. Dad never argued. Mother was still around, still alive, and every time I saw her, every time we talked, I thought of the Big Lie my parents had woven around me until my twenty-first birthday.

  “I’m still on the hot seat, worse now than before,” I said. “I’m stuck with being king as well as Hero, and everything is falling apart—more than you ever had to contend with. And there’s no sign of this legendary Golden Age, and wasn’t that the rationale behind the lying, the deceit?”

  I stood there for a while, then moved on down the row of burial slots. The Heroes and kings of Varay. The Heroes were stacked three high, the kings only two high. And right in the middle, Vara was all alone. At one point, not long after I recovered from the wounds I suffered in and before the Battle of Thyme, I made an effort to memorize all the names and dates. I asked questions about who did what and when, and read some of the old books and scrolls that Parthet and Kardeen kept about the history of Varay and the rest of the buffer zone. But I gave that all up fairly quickly. The answers tended to be too depressing.

  I made a long stop at Vara’s niche. As I had many times before, I wondered if his remains were really in there, if he had really lived and wasn’t just part of a legend cooked up to fill a gap … which led me—this time—to wonder if the set of family jewels I had swiped from the shrines of the Great Earth Mother had originally been his. That apparition of the Great Earth Mother in the shrine had promised to destroy me when she realized that I wasn’t really Vara.

  The balls, one ruby and one emerald, were they gemstones only or the somehow transformed testicles of Vara?

  “If they are yours, at least they’re back in the family again,” I mumbled.

  Two separate legends.

  One told how the Great Earth Mother had wandered the void before the beginning of time, before Creation, until she found a mate that she considered suitable. Their coupling had resulting in the Great Earth Mother’s giving birth to the entire universe. At some point after that, she had decided that she liked the offspring but not the sire, so she killed her mate and cut off his nuts as a keepsake. And they were apparently hanging with my own now, swallowed in desperation on the island out in the Mist when everything was falling down around me. They seemed to tingle while I stood by Vara’s niche and touched his capstone.

  The second legend told how Vara had been a renegade in and then a refugee from Fairy. His name was an obsolete version of the word “Fairy” in the language of that realm. Vara had come south through Xayber with a small band of loyal followers, fighting all the way. He had finally stopped all the forces of the Elfking at the southern end of the Isthmus of Xayber. With peace finally won, Vara had founded the Kingdom of Varay, or perhaps the entire buffer zone between Fairy and the mortal realm, to protect regular people from the magical depredations of the elves. His reign had been (in legend, at least) a Golden Age of peace and prosperity.

  I had started to wonder if, somehow, the two separate legends might be parts of the same whole, if perhaps Vara was the stud who tumbled the Great Earth Mother, back before the beginning of time … or whenever. And there was only one person who might know the answer—Parthet.

  I lose track of time when I’m down in the crypt. It may have been an hour, or only ten minutes, before I got to Great-Grandfather Pregel. I put my hand on his capstone. The edges of the newly carved letters and numbers were rougher than on the older stones. I stood there and couldn’t think of anything to say to Pregel. Except, after a time, “Goodbye.”

  Before I left the crypt, I stopped and looked at the blank section of wall across the room from Vara. That was where they would put me someday, if there was anyone left to put me there when the time came.

  “You’re going to be lonely in there,” I said. “No next-door neighbors to rub elbows with.” The thought twisted my gut—not the thought of being lonely on that side of the wall, just the idea of someday being there behind a marble headstone with my name, titles, and dates. I had been too close to earning a place in the wall over by Dad.

  I left the crypt and forced a rapid pace up the stairs toward the living precincts of the castle. I went all the way up to the royal apartments above the great hall in the keep. To the king’s bedroom.

  There were no lights on in the bedroom. I left the door open until I found one of the oil lamps and lit it. Then I closed the door and looked around. As I had instructed, nothing had been touched yet. I wasn’t looking forward to moving into a dead man’s bedroom, or to sleeping in the bed where he had died, but I knew how tradition-bound Varay was. This was the king’s bedroom. This was where the king was supposed to sleep.

  The bedroom was vast—something like thirty by fifty feet. Looking in from the hallway door down the long dimension, there were windows on the wall to the right and in the wall at the far end of the room. To the right the view was down into the courtyard. The far end looked down over the curtain wall, down the sheer northern face of Basil Rock, several hundred feet to the River Tarn that curled past the base. The royal bed was more than twice the size of a “king-size” bed. It was centered along the left wall. Three doors opened off of that wall into other rooms of the royal suite, privy, bath and dressing room, and study.

  Before his health failed, Pregel had been an active monarch. There had been a big desk up on the dais in the throne room, and it was often cluttered. At some point, between the time when Pregel publicly announced that I was his heir and his death, that desk had been moved up to the study, replacing a smaller desk that had been there before. The study had been his working office, most of the time I knew him. We had shared a few leisurely chats in that office. The only person who ever dared disturb the king in his office was Baron Kardeen, and the chamberlain knew when—and when not—to disturb Pregel.

  It was an old-fashioned office. What else could it be in Varay? The big desk was an antique that was probably worth many thousands of dollars back in the other world. There was a library, racks of deep pigeonholes to hold scrolls, shelves to hold books. Ah, the books. Pregel had medieval romances, modern sciences, an almost complete set of Louis L’Amour’s westerns. He had Hitler and Machiavelli, Gibran and Nietzsche. A twelfth-century Bible copied in a Norman monastery was on a stand like those that libraries use to hold their unabridged dictionaries. There were also other religious books, copies dating from the Middle Ages or before, Koran, Talmud, Zend Avesta, and others. It didn’t matter what language a book was written in, not in the buffer zone with its translation magic.

  I opened the drawers in two wooden file cabinets, one at a time, wondering what exotic documents of state I might find. There were a few deeds and charters, a few letters, but five of the eight drawers were given over to magazines. I thumbed through the drawers. It looked as if Pregel had complete sets of Penthouse and Playboy, from their premiere issues up to about four years ago.

  I chuckled when I shut the last drawer.

  “It looks like I really didn’t know you at all,” I mumbled. I sat in the chair behind the big desk, reached out and stroked the smooth, worn desktop. The desk drawers were filled with working supplies, paper and pens, and the usual odds and ends that get chucked into drawers and forgotten.

  There was a second exit from the study, leading directly out to the corridor, a way to bypass going through the bedroom all the time. Across the corridor was the king’s private dining room, for those times when he wanted to avoid presiding over a meal in the great hall, or for private mealtime discussions. Back stairs led down to the kitchens, and to Baron Kardeen’s office. Even after three and a half years I didn’t know where all the secret passages were, though I had found a few of them.

  I wasn’t expecting the knock on the hall door. I jumped, then said, “Come in.” I guessed that it would be Baron Kardeen. I was wrong. It was Aaron.

  “I wasn’t sure if I should disturb you or not,” he said.

  “Come on in and have a seat,” I told him
. “You’re not interrupting anything but my brooding, and that needs interruption.” He came over and sat in the chair at the side of the desk. So far, Aaron had shown none of the irritating “Your Majesty” routine, and that was a relief.

  “You know, I’m going to need time to get used to that souvenir of our elf that you carry.”

  Aaron touched the streak of white skin on the left side of his face. “Ah, that. It is more than skin deep. At odd moments, I think I have a little of him inside my head too.”

  “Enough to find out what I have to do with these spare balls?”

  “No. That’s the first thing I tried to find out. But Parthet is putting together some sort of special incantation. Something new, something not in any of the books and scrolls he taught me from. That’s why I came looking for you. He says that he’s going to need you present to run the spell.”

  “And if that doesn’t work, we’re back to calling up the Elflord of Xayber and asking for his help,” I said.

  “It may not be necessary. Despite all the doom talk, there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly rotten happening at the moment,” Aaron said. “Maybe what you’ve done already is enough, despite what Wellivazey said.”

  “I don’t believe it,” I said.

  Aaron shrugged. “Parthet is trying hard to make himself believe it. He keeps talking about that Golden Age jazz.”

  We sat and looked at each other for a bit.

  “When is he going to be ready to try this new magic?” I asked.

  “A day or two, he says. He’s working now, has been, just about straight through. He’s even having his food brought to the workroom so he can keep going without interruptions.”

  “That doesn’t sound like he’s had much luck convincing himself that the danger is past,” I said. Aaron shrugged again. “A day or two?” I asked. He nodded.

  “I’ve got to make arrangements to get the Russians back to the real world. And Joy and I would like to get a little time to ourselves while we still can. The only way we’re likely to get that time is to go back to Chicago or Louisville, and I’m not sure that I can anymore.” I told Aaron what Mother had said about Pregel.