The Hero King

by Rick Shelley

  “How far do you suppose we are from St. Louis right now?” Aaron asked. “Straight line, not the way we might have to go.”

  “I’m not sure. Probably no more than a hundred miles, maybe less.”

  “We get settled in for the night, I’ll start trying to find your wife’s family.”

  “Just how do you work that?” I asked. “Parthet always said he had to be able to see things for most of his magic.”

  “Most,” Aaron agreed. “But I’ve seen photographs. Joy showed them to me. Snapshots. And I’ve got a good read on her. I think I can make the link to her family. But I’m still not sure how close I have to be.”

  Aaron didn’t come up with anything that night. The next morning, we did head due west. I decided that the immediate advantages of having all that forest around us were more important than the disadvantages of too many people later.

  Riding through the National Forest, we didn’t see any obvious signs of nuclear war. Of course, the roads we crossed were empty of traffic, except for a few pedestrians, and there were occasional encampments of refugees, but most of the time we might almost have had the world to ourselves. That was a touchy thought.

  Dad and I had talked of camping in the Shawnee National Forest a couple of times. We had even sent away for brochures and maps. But with so many place to go outdoors, we just never made it to this area. It’s not all wilderness and trees. There are small towns, villages, scattered through the area, but we stayed away from them, the way we had been staying away from any concentrations of people.

  “It’s not really like Precarra,” Lesh said, early on our first full day in Illinois.

  “No, not nearly as wild,” I said. “There are deer, raccoons, skunks, some other small animals.” But they probably wouldn’t last for long if masses of hungry people started foraging for survival. Hunting laws wouldn’t mean a thing now.

  There were even birds in the trees.

  We were riding through a thin patch of the forest when we heard the helicopter coming. There was only time to pull in close to a couple of trees and halt, hoping that we wouldn’t be spotted. A helicopter would most likely be military, and soldiers would ask too many questions if they found a group like us.

  “You know that magic Parthet uses to hide people from dragons?” I whispered.

  “Already working,” Aaron said.

  “At least it means that there’s some sort of government functioning here,” I said after the Army chopper flew over—not nearly high enough for comfort. But there seemed to be no hesitation, no change in its course. Apparently they hadn’t spotted us.

  “Maybe they’re checking air samples,” I said after we started riding again. “I saw something like that in some movie about World War Three, and they did a lot of that kind of sampling after the Coral Lady.”

  After hiding from the helicopter, I started picking our path with more of an eye to cover, but even with that, we almost rode out of the forest about the middle of the afternoon. We stopped, then turned and headed farther south to keep trees around us and, as much as possible, over us. Riding alongside an oiled-gravel secondary road, we stumbled on a little village that had been burned. The fire was recent. Although the ashes and remains were cool, the fine soot and ash was still loose, swirling along the ground.

  “Nobody dropped a bomb on this place,” Aaron said.

  “No.” I stopped my horse and dismounted. The others followed my lead. We walked along the road, the only real street the village had boasted, leading our horses. There was nothing left but charred remains—a couple of cars, the foundations of several houses, the axles and metal underframes of a couple of mobile homes, odds and ends like the twisted and blackened frame of a child’s tricycle.

  “Bodies.” Lesh pointed off to the side. Back behind the foundation of a house we found two dozen bodies, all huddled together. Some were burned beyond recognition. The stench was overpowering.

  “Someone herded them all together and killed them,” Lesh said.

  “Raiders, thugs like those people at the bridge,” I guessed. Lesh grunted.

  “I suppose there are a lot of people like that,” Aaron said.

  “And if the Army or National Guard spots us, they’re sure to think that we fit the description,” I said. Reasonable pessimism.

  “We’ll just have to make sure they don’t spot us,” Aaron said. After a slight hesitation, he added, “Or if they do see us, we’ll have to make them think we’re something they really don’t believe.”

  “You have an idea, I take it?”

  “We might as well be those Four Horsemen. Folks want to think we are anyway.”

  “Disguises?” I asked.

  “Just my kind of disguise,” Aaron said. “If I can remember—let’s see, a white horse, a red horse, a black horse, and a pale horse.”

  “That still leaves two horses,” I reminded him.

  “The packhorses. They won’t count. You got the sword—one of the riders is mentioned with a sword, maybe more. And we’ve got to look like something that can’t be, real movie-monster stuff. Let’s find us a place away from these bodies and I’ll take care of it.”

  “Hang on a second. How many different magics can you hold on to at one time?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. How many names do-you remember?”

  “It can’t be the same.”

  “No. Wait, you said you studied computers?” I nodded. “Do you remember any of the programs you wrote?”

  “Nothing longer than a half-dozen lines,” I said.

  “Oh.” Aaron shook his head. “I guess that comparison won’t work then. It doesn’t matter. Most of the magics don’t need my constant attention. I start them up and they run, they keep running. Sometimes I have to goose ‘em a little later on. Only a few are more demanding. The big ones, mostly.”

  I still didn’t understand, but he was the expert.

  We followed the road out of the little village, still on foot, leading our horses. When the road bent a little and took the ruins out of sight, Aaron turned off the road, into the trees. About fifty yards in, we stopped, near a creek.

  “The horses should be cool enough to drink their fill right off,” Lesh said. “We been walking ‘em long enough.”

  “Okay, you and Timon take care of it. But stick close.” I wanted to watch Aaron do his stuff. Magic still fascinated me.

  “I’ve got to see you all to do this,” Aaron said.

  He sat under a tree and rested his back against it. He stared at me when he started chanting. After a moment, he turned his attention to Lesh and then to Timon. Finally, he stared at each of the horses we were riding, in turn. He chanted the entire time, and the tingling of active magic was so strong that I had to fight the urge to scratch. Before Aaron stopped, he moved over to the creek and knelt next to it. He leaned over so he could see his own face reflected in the water.

  When he got up, he cleared his throat and looked my way.

  “I think that’ll do it,” he said.

  “Do what?” I asked. “I don’t see any disguises.”

  “We’re not trying to hide from us,” Aaron said. “We’re inside the magic, not looking in.”

  “Then how can you be sure it’s working?”

  “It’s my job to know,” Aaron said, with an unusual firmness to his voice.

  I nodded. “Let’s get a few more hours of riding in,” I said. “I don’t want to camp anywhere near that village.”

  We went back to the road and followed it, staying off to the side so the horses wouldn’t have to contend with all that oiled gravel. The road went southwest, deeper into the forest, just what I was looking for. I wanted to make sure that we had plenty of cover. But we would have to head west again before long.

  “There’s a car up ahead,” Lesh called out after we had gone about three miles farther.

  “I see it,” I said. “Let’s be careful about this. The people who burned that village may have run out of gas.”

  “Y
ou feel anything, sire?” Timon asked.

  I hesitated long enough to take stock of my danger sense. “Nothing special,” I said.

  But we slowed down anyway. The car was intact, a rarity along this ride. As we got closer, Aaron said, “You want to see our disguises? Look in the rear window of this car when we get right up to it.”

  The four of us bunched up. I guess the others wanted to see what the magic had done too.

  Until we saw it.

  I looked down into the rear window and saw the reflections of four skeletons draped in ragged, bloody robes.

  10

  The Camps

  I didn’t sleep well that night. I was haunted by the reflections I had seen in that car window. It was worse than the Congregation of Heroes dream, or vision, whatever that was. Lesh and Timon had both been hit hard by the reflection too, perhaps even harder than I was. They were more thoroughly Varayan, a land where myth and superstition lies much closer to reality than in the land I was raised in. We rode on in almost total silence after looking in that car window. The silence continued when we finally camped. There was only the most essential conversation. Aaron erected his nightly shield. We lit a fire and cooked our supper. And we kept a close watch on the sky.

  Rain was threatening again, so we pitched tents, lightweight nylon jobs that had come from the sporting goods department at Marshall Field’s in Chicago. As usual, I took the first watch of the night. When the rain came, I pulled down the bill of my Cubs cap and stood next to a large tree, leaning back against the trunk, trying to escape as much of the falling water as I could. It was a steady, heavy downpour that fell almost silently and blotted out any normal night sounds. There was no wind to drive the rain, no thunder and lightning to divert attention from the soaking.

  It was a thoroughly miserable night. I missed Joy. I worried about the way she had carried on, forcing this expedition. I worried about the extra moons that I couldn’t see because of all the clouds and rain, the Doomsday they were supposed to presage. Several times, I fancied that I saw the four skeletal faces staring at me out of the rain.

  When the downpour seemed to slacken off, just a little, I woke Lesh. He replaced me next to the tree trunk and I crawled into my tent, trying to leave as much of the water outside as I could. That didn’t work very well, but I went through the motions. I crouched at the end of the tent and stripped off my weapons, boots, and wet outer clothes before I got into my blanket. I had dry clothing in a saddlebag, but I didn’t want to get into it until I had to—preferably after the rain stopped. If an alarm came in the night and I didn’t have time to get dressed, I would just have to meet it in my underwear.

  Even though I was exhausted—every day of riding and moping left me feeling more drained than the day before—sleep took its own time and some of mine before it arrived. Rain hit the tent. When I closed my eyes, I saw the four specters staring at me, mocking me, laughing at me.

  But, eventually, I did sleep.

  And sometime later, I saw the face of the Elflord of Xayber hovering over me.

  His face was as clear, as sharply defined, as it was when we talked in Castle Basil, but only his head and shoulders appeared this time. He was speaking, but I couldn’t hear a word he said. I had a long, suspended bout with panic, fearing that I would miss the most vital message in history. Only gradually did I realize that this was only a dream, not the message I was waiting for.

  Only a dream. If only the whole mess would turn out to be no more than that! But even after my logical self decided that this visitation from the elflord was only a dream, my heart continued to flutter. I needed more convincing. The dream woke me. I lay awake for ages, nervous, keyed up, heart pounding, caught in the real adrenaline rush of my dream fear.

  The rain had stopped, for a while at least. We had ridden through a lot of rain the last few days, off and on—dirty rain, heavy rain, as the atmosphere started to reject much of the dirt and debris forced on it by the nuclear explosions. The sky had even cleared now, for the most part, and we hadn’t seen much of clear skies since we left Varay. I looked out through the tent flap. Aaron was on guard….

  And there were four moons in the sky, lined up one after the other, barely separated by their own diameters.

  I was more tired than I could remember ever being when I finally crawled out of my tent a few minutes after dawn—a red dawn, with the sky still hazy but mostly clear, the brightest dawn we had seen since stepping through to Louisville.

  “I’m starting to pick something up,” Aaron told me.

  “Joy’s family?” I asked.

  “I think so. Off in that direction.” He pointed roughly northwest, maybe closer to north-northwest.

  “Unless I’m way off the way I remember the map, St. Louis should be about there,” I said. “This magic would only find them if they’re alive?”

  Aaron nodded. “At least one of them must still be alive. I can’t be more specific than that.”

  “Maybe we should give up on my idea of staying down here in the forest and just follow your magic magnet. I’d get worried if you lost the trace.” Well, I was already worried, about a lot of things, but it got my meaning across.

  “You saw the moons,” Aaron said. There was no hint of an interrogatory in his voice, so he must have seen me looking out of my tent in the night.

  “Four of them,” I said. “And when the count reaches seven, that’s the end, according to Xayber.”

  “We knew that time was going to be critical.”

  “Sometime today, we should hit Interstate 57,” I said. “If we start heading northwest now, we should hit 57 north of the fork. It splits just south of Marion; 57 goes south to Cairo and Memphis, 24 goes to Paducah.”

  “Interstate means maybe a lot of people,” Aaron said.

  I nodded. “Refugees from anywhere to anywhere. My guess is that any relief efforts would have to start along the major highways, where they’re still usable.”

  “I sure wish we knew just how bad things are. Other than what we’ve seen for ourselves,” Aaron said.

  “You’re not the only one.”

  There were so many unknowns yet. After the Coral Lady, people would have been nervous. The genie had been let out of the bottle. But had there been enough warning before the big war to start people migrating away from the cities? Had there been a chance to start any evacuations, make any preparations? I could remember Dad talking about how seriously people took Civil Defense in the fifties and early sixties—bomb shelters, air raid drills, Conelrad—and then nothing, because of indifference and budget restrictions. World War Three was the bogeyman who would never come. People were so indifferent to the danger that even the dramatic changes in the Communist world in the late eighties and early nineties couldn’t decrease the level any further. If the United States came out of this much worse than the Russians or the people of western Europe, it would be because of that longtime ho-hum attitude. Forget Nostradamus. Aesop had us pegged in his fable about the ant and the grasshopper. And we were the grasshoppers.

  “Maybe the elflord was right,” I muttered.

  “Right about what?” Aaron asked.

  “That it’s all for the best if this world passes away.”

  “Why the sudden funk?”

  I told him.

  “Then it’s still going to be up to you to see that something better comes after, right?” He said it very seriously, which didn’t help my mood.

  Right, I thought. Fat chance.

  “We’d better get cracking or we’ll waste the whole morning,” I said. That was easier than arguing. I could continue my funk while we rode.

  “That what we saw yesterday, that really how folks will see us?” Lesh asked not long after we got into our saddles again.

  “That’s how they’ll see us,” Aaron said.

  “What happens if they get so scared that they start shooting right off?” Lesh had a practical mind. He saw that possibility before I did.

  “There was always the c
hance that people would shoot at us,” Aaron said. “Those men at the railroad bridge were ready to start shooting and they saw us the way we are.”

  “I got me an itch at the back of my neck,” Lesh said.

  “You’d better be careful,” I said softly. “I may give you the Hero job.”

  Lesh sputtered a little and didn’t recover until I started laughing. “It’s okay, Lesh,” I said. “We’re all nervous about this. Anyway, people who shoot at ghosts are usually too scared to hit them.”

  “And fear can be cultivated,” Aaron said. Then he clucked at his horse a couple of times and moved out ahead of us to avoid answering any follow-up questions.

  “Come on, Lesh. We’ll worry about shooters when the time comes,” I said.

  Aaron led the way all day. Guessing from the position of the sun, we were heading just a little west of northwest, not quite the direction he had indicated that morning. A couple of times, we stopped and Aaron did a minute or two of chanting. Both times, we changed course—just a little.

  “It gets a little stronger every mile we ride,” Aaron said.

  And later, “Your wife’s parents turned Varay down once. You sure they’ll want to go back? Even with all this war stuff, they may want to stay in a world they know.”

  “I can’t see anyone choosing to stay here if they had a chance to go to a place that hadn’t been touched by the war.” Deep breath time. “Much as I hate to even think about this, we’re going to have to take them to Varay whether they want to go or not, even if Lesh and I have to tie them up and carry them through.”

  Aaron didn’t comment.

  “The problem we may have is keeping other people from trying to crowd through the doorway,” I said after a couple of minutes. “If folks are panicked enough, they’ll even risk your Four Horsemen to escape.”

  “And?”

  “If we can do it without a riot, we can take some people through. Varay can always use people, a few thousand anyway.” As long as they didn’t all get in and expect to find a quaint but familiar version of back-home-before-the-war. And maybe some of them would go through to Varay and then want to leave after they saw what it was like.