The Hero King

by Rick Shelley

  Aaron put an extra shield around us when we camped, not against radiation, but to make us harder to see if anyone came near, something like the veil Parthet had put over us in eastern Varay to hide us from a dragon. We kindled a fire and prepared supper without magic, though. I still had a large supply of packaged almost-instant camping meals. We would use those as long as possible. Despite the flair Aaron showed for every magic he attempted, I wasn’t eager to find out what a meal conjured up out of nothing but magic might taste like.

  We had to treat this as an excursion into enemy territory, just as was my trek north along the Isthmus of Xayber years before. Maybe the dangers weren’t the same, but they could be just as great. People running from the horror of nuclear war couldn’t be expected to observe all the niceties of civilization. To put it mildly. And a lot of civilization hadn’t been very civil even before. Hungry people might covet our horses, or whatever supplies they might be able to take off our dead bodies.

  “How much of this will we have?” Lesh asked before I turned in for the night. He was as shaken by the devastation as I was, and he had fewer ties to this world.

  “I don’t know. Maybe today was the worst we’ll see, at least until we get close to St. Louis. It’s probably just as bad there. In between, who knows? Remember, the radio said that some rural places were okay.” Relatively okay maybe, but I doubted that anyplace was anything near normal.

  “How long do you figure this ride will take?” Aaron asked.

  “It must be nearly three hundred miles to St. Louis,” I said. “Something like that, anyway. All things considered, we may be lucky to manage twenty-five miles a day.” I thought that was a properly pessimistic estimate. There was no telling what we would face—in addition to a couple of major rivers.

  I woke a little before dawn, not with my danger sense clanging, but just because I was sleeping lightly. I had spent a disturbed night, part of it apparently in conversation with the recurring dream of the Congregation of Heroes. I still hoped that it was just a dream.

  I sat up and stretched, feeling troubled, less rested than I should have been. Dreaming about my father, Vara, and all of the other dead men who had been Hero of Varay in turn always did that to me. Timon was on guard. He spotted the movement as I sat up and came toward me. The sky was thickly clouded, but there was still a faint trace of illumination in the night, mostly a touch of red reflected from the base of the cloud cover. I wasn’t sure if the red was a reflection of distant fires or a more direct remnant of the nuclear exchange.

  “An eerie night, sire,” Timon whispered. He had waited a moment to speak, probably wondering if I had awakened because I sensed imminent danger. When I didn’t leap to arms or call the others, he assumed that I hadn’t.

  “Eerie,” I agreed. “Have you heard any noises?” We had camped fifty yards off a road, back in an area where there were rock outcroppings to hide us from prying eyes—in case Aaron’s magical blanket wasn’t enough. There was a little grass in the lee of the rocks, grass that hadn’t burned when the nuclear explosions seared everything in their path.

  “Naught but the wind,” Timon said. “Not even a cricket.”

  A long night, I thought. Too long. I stared at the clouds. They must be awful thick, I decided. To the east, there was still no recognizable hint of dawn. I didn’t think nuclear winter was supposed to start with a total blockage of sunlight, just with enough debris held in the air to keep out a significant portion of the light in the frequencies that plants need to grow.

  “The days may be dim for a while, Timon,” I whispered. “As if the Titan Mountains had been pulverized into the finest dust and scattered to the winds.” Sunset the night before had been short but fiery. I expected sunrise to be about the same.

  If it came.

  Lesh yawned and stretched as if he were waking in his own bed. Then he sat up quickly as he remembered where he was. Aaron propped himself up on an elbow as if he had been awake for some time.

  “A fire?” Lesh asked softly.

  “We might as well,” I said. “I think we’re still too close to ground zero for anyone to be prowling around.” I wondered how many warheads had been targeted against the area. It had to be at least two, maybe three. There was an Army quartermaster depot across the Ohio River in New Albany, as well as all the targets on the Kentucky side. No single bomb could be certain to take out both Fort Knox and the depot, forty-odd miles away.

  Lesh had stockpiled enough bits of usable wood the night before, stuff that was charred but hadn’t completely burned. There were tons of it around. Aaron lit the fire and Lesh and Timon went about preparing breakfast.

  “I had nightmares,” Lesh said when he had a chance to talk to me a little apart from the others. “I’ve never had nightmares in all my life.”

  “You’ve never had such good reason,” I told him. “Nuclear war—that’s more concentrated evil than all the elflords in Fairy rolled into one. If an H-bomb went off over our heads now, maybe even five or six miles straight up, not all the magic in creation could save us.” Lesh looked up at the sky. There was finally a little light coming from the east.

  “Evil dreams,” Lesh muttered, and then he went off to check the horses.

  “Evil dreams,” I echoed softly. And waking up didn’t get rid of them.

  8

  Legions

  Rain came not long after dawn, a dirty rain that had to be loaded with radioactive dust—the dust of civilization and hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dead people. It poured for two hours or more while we rode west, but there were no fresh smells of nature following this rain. The odors were all of death and rot. Over and over, I found myself worrying that Aaron’s magic might not be enough to protect us from the radiation. He had renewed the spells before we broke camp.

  “I don’t think it’s really necessary yet, but there’s no use taking chances we don’t have to,” he said.

  I agreed wholeheartedly with that.

  We started to come across badly burned bodies, some with mutilating injuries. These weren’t stripped bones. These were the bodies of people who had lived long enough to start fleeing west, away from Fort Knox. And we started to see abandoned cars along the road. The two I bothered to check were both out of gas. The riders had driven as far as they could, then continued on foot.

  “We’ll start coming on live folks soon,” Lesh predicted, and he was right. Within an hour we saw people walking along the road. Even in disaster, they thought that there was some advantage to staying on the roads, as if help would come driving up.

  Maybe it would, for some of them. Kentucky has a lot of wild country. There might be hollows that had escaped the direct effects of the bombs, even fairly close, places where people might attempt to rescue outsiders … until they started to worry more about their own supplies and long-term survival. I thought that hospitality would run out quickly, even among most of the church groups.

  “Let’s move a little farther away from the road,” I said. “Some of those people may have guns and the will to use them. Our horses may look like steak on the hoof.”

  We turned off into a valley that headed a little north of west and took us out of sight of the road. There was a trail along the bottom of the valley, but from the ruts that the rain hadn’t completely washed away, it looked like only jeeps had used it in ages.

  I tried to blank out any feeling, without notable success. How could anyone view such destruction without feeling it rip at their guts? I could call it a waking nightmare and write it off like that if I could, but the reality was so much worse than any nightmare, so insistent, so total, that I wanted to scream. I wanted to close my eyes and curl up in a ball and just wait for it all to go away. I wanted to run, as far and as fast as I could, anything to get away from it.

  But there was no escape.

  We reached an area where the trees were still standing. Autumn had come to western Kentucky even before the war, so only the evergreens still showed green. The leaves of the
deciduous trees had already turned color. Most had fallen and matted the ground. I saw a few squirrels, but there were still no birds in evidence.

  “It’s all so dead,” Timon mumbled. He was riding close behind me, leading the packhorses.

  “Deader than anything you ever imagined,” I said.

  “There’s water not far ahead,” Aaron said. He was leading the way at the moment. He pointed off to his left. “I just caught a glimpse of a creek or something.”

  “Let’s check it out. The horses could use a rest and a little time to graze,” I said. “We can use a break too.” We had been riding for most of the morning by then, with only a couple of very short stops.

  The business of stopping, dismounting, and loosening the cinches on our horses used up a couple of minutes. Lesh and Timon linked the animals on a picket line, and Timon was there to keep them away from the creek until they cooled off.

  The creek wasn’t much, just a couple of feet wide and not even that deep, but it was running water, and almost clear. I stood on the bank and stretched. My chain mail, the swords hanging across my back, even the old jeans I was wearing seemed to chafe and drag at me. Aaron came up beside me. He was wearing a shirt and trousers made in Varay out of something like sailcloth. The only weapon he wore was a small dagger on his belt. He had no wand, no pouches of paraphernalia. All Aaron needed for his wizardry was his head—eyes, mouth, and mind—and whatever special magic that initiation into the craft conferred. He didn’t need props.

  I turned to Aaron and had started to say something when I heard a noise, off along the creek. It sounded like a baby crying, then being silenced quickly. I listened closely and then I heard a very soft shushing sound and knew I was right.

  “Is somebody there?” I called. “It’s all right. We won’t hurt you.” And I hoped they wouldn’t panic and hurt us. My danger sense got a little more active, but it didn’t sound a full-blown warning.

  “Do you need help?” I asked, taking a couple of steps in the direction the sounds had come from.

  Aaron stepped across the stream and moved parallel to me, just a step or two at a time. With everything wet from the morning rain, we didn’t make any noise. No twigs snapped or anything like that. I tried to use my danger sense to home in on the noises, but the threat wasn’t great enough for me to read it that precisely.

  Aaron had less trouble. He pointed, farther downstream, at my side of the creek. There was a thick area of vines that had grown around the remains of a tree that had fallen long ago and started to rot.

  “It’s all right,” I said, not quite as loud as before. “We’re not going to hurt anyone or take anything from you. If you’re hungry, we have food to share.”

  I heard a soft whimper that was almost immediately cut off, then the rustle of vines. Aaron spotted them just a second before I did, deep in the tangled thicket. A family. The man stood up first. The woman was holding a baby, not newborn, but not more than a few months old. And there was a boy who couldn’t be old enough for school. They were all wet, bedraggled, and quite obviously scared.

  “I know we look strange, but really, we won’t hurt you,” I said.

  Off to the side, perhaps even closer to the family than either Aaron or me, I heard Lesh’s voice. “Sire?”

  The man and woman looked off that way. Sire, I thought. That’s just what we needed. As if seeing the long swords on my back wasn’t enough to convince frightened people that they had fallen into the clutches of lunatics.

  The man and woman looked at each other then. He shrugged.

  “We have nothing left to lose but our lives,” the man said. “Hard enough holding on to them now.”

  “Do you have a clear path out of there?” Aaron asked. His voice sounded strangely gentle, reassuring, even to me. I decided that he was weaving some sort of spell with his words.

  “We crawled in, as far as we could,” the man said. “Last night, hiding.”

  “That’s why you’re all scratched up then,” Aaron said. “Here, I can make it easier for you to get out.” He hummed, then chanted and started to sway, using a magic I had once seen Uncle Parthet use. Maybe it was the one piece of magic that had really convinced me that the buffer zone ran by different rules from this world’s. The vines started to untangle themselves, opening a way along the creek from the family toward us.

  “Hurry through,” Aaron said when the path was complete. “It takes some effort to hold this for any time.”

  Maybe substituting something supernatural for them to worry about was a step in the right direction. I’m not sure. But they came through, looking more frightened the closer they got.

  “My name’s Gil Tyner,” I said when they were free of the brambles. “My friend here is Aaron Carpenter. He’s, ah, something of a wizard. There are two others waiting with our horses, Lesh and Timon. You’ll meet them in a minute. And no matter how different, how strange, we look, you won’t come to any harm at our hands.”

  “We’re the good guys,” Aaron said, still in that abnormally reassuring voice.

  “I’m Charley Ingels,” the man said. “My wife Mary. Little Charley and Marie.” The children. “We were on our way to visit Mary’s brother at Fort Knox when it happened.”

  “There’s nothing left of Fort Knox,” I said, trying to look sympathetic.

  “We know,” Charley said. “We went on as long as we could, then we had to turn back. We ran out of gas. I didn’t want to stay with the car. We had … we saw some pretty ugly things happen to people.”

  “You were trying to get home?” I asked.

  Charley nodded. “We live in Missouri, in Rolla. I teach engineering at the university there.”

  “Rolla? How far’s that from St. Louis?”

  “About a hundred miles,” his wife said. “Southwest, out toward Fort Leonard Wood.” Which might be in the same shape as Fort Knox.

  “I don’t know if you could get that far, even if you still had your car,” I said. “Not much chance of finding a bridge over the Mississippi. Hey, I don’t know if they’ve got refugee camps set up yet, but I think that’s about the best anyone can hope for right now.”

  “But where?” Charley asked. “I don’t even know where to start.” He didn’t look like any of the professors I had in college, but then I had never seen any of them in circumstances like these.

  “How late yesterday did you hear any news?” I asked.

  “Noon. And we ran out of gas not a half hour later.”

  I shook my head. “The only news I heard was at two, and there wasn’t much then, nothing about a relocation center. I guess nobody’s that organized yet.”

  “You must be hungry, and we’re just standing around gabbing,” Aaron said. “We have plenty of food.” He gestured back toward where we had left the horses.

  Lesh must have caught the hint when I said that he and Timon were both back with the horses. And more than that, he had a fire going to cook some of our packaged meals and had a kettle of water on too. In a few minutes, we could offer instant coffee.

  “We have powdered milk for the children,” Aaron said. Timon hurried to one of the packs, right on cue. “It’s not the best stuff, maybe.” Aaron crinkled his nose. “But maybe this will help it go down.” He knelt by Little Charley and offered him a Milky Way. Little Charley looked up to his parents for permission before he took it.

  “We might as well all sit down and rest,” I said. “Lunch will be a few minutes.”

  “Just who the hell are you anyway?” Charley asked. His shock was giving way to something else.

  I smiled and shook my head. “You couldn’t possibly believe that story,” I said.

  “I see guns, swords, bows. You’re riding horses that make the Budweiser Clydesdales look puny. What the hell is this?”

  I gave him the one-word explanation. “Magic.” I expected some kind of indignant outburst at that. Charley opened his mouth, but shut it again without saying whatever he had planned to say. He waited a moment to speak. />
  “You mean that, don’t you?”

  I laughed. “Delicate phrasing, Professor.”

  “You saw the vines,” Aaron said, and Charley nodded. “By the calendar, I’m not quite nine years old yet. Four months ago, I stood about this high.” He held a hand out just above waist level. “I was small for my age. My parents were both on the Coral Lady when it was blown up. I heard the news and disappeared from my grandmother’s home in Joliet, Illinois. Where I turned up was in this fairy-tale kingdom called Varay. I grew up in just a couple of weeks. Gil Tyner here was Hero of Varay. I mean, the man fights dragons and elf warriors. Did you hear about that dragon that was killed here in Kentucky? That was him too.”

  “I saw that on TV,” Mary said. Her husband nodded.

  “And I remember hearing something on the news about a little kid disappearing somewhere, just after the Coral Lady,” Charley said.

  Timon fixed up two mugs of instant coffee and gave them to the Ingelses. “He was Hero of Varay,” Timon said, jerking a thumb toward me after he got the mugs out of his hands. “Now he’s King of Varay too.”

  “King?” Charley asked.

  “King,” I agreed. “Aaron is my wizard. Timon is my squire. And Lesh, Sir Lesh, is my right-hand man when it comes to battles and fighting dragons.”

  Charley looked at his wife. “I think I’ve gone crazy, dear,” he said.

  “If you have, then so have I,” she said. “I’m hearing things too.”

  “Did you really kill a dragon?” little Charley asked. He had finished his candy bar, though he looked as if he was wearing as much of it on his face and hands as he had eaten.

  “I’ve had to kill a couple of dragons,” I told him.