The Hero King

by Rick Shelley

  “You might as well come inside and be comfortable for a while, while you may,” the elflord said in neutral tones. “Dawn is yet a time away, and we have much to do before it comes.”

  I nodded. I didn’t want to speak for fear that my teeth would chatter from the unexpected nip in the unexpected night.

  Xayber turned from me to look down at his son. He touched a pale cheek, then grasped his son’s shoulder.

  The elflord stood motionless for a long moment before he gestured toward his waiting servants.

  “Take him inside and have him prepared for the vigil.”

  Those servants led the way toward the door, flanked by others with the torches. Xayber turned to me and gestured after them, while a final two servants took the reins of my horses.

  “You bested him in single combat when he had every conceivable advantage, a costly miscalculation on our part,” Xayber said. It wasn’t an apology, but I hoped I was right in reading the statement as a “let bygones be bygones” sort of truce.

  “In some ways, your son and I were not so different,” I said, choosing my words with exceptional care and making all sorts of mental reservations. “Both of us doing what we saw as our duty. This may sound banal, but there have been times when I wished that we had known each other before he died as well as we did after.”

  We stopped at the top of the stairs, on a porch or patio that was long enough to hold a half-dozen shuffleboard courts end to end.

  Quite seriously, Xayber said, “I thank you for that.”

  The ultrapolite, almost warm, welcome from the elflord made me more nervous than open hostility could possibly have.

  I’m not sure what I expected from the elflord’s mansion—something exotic, no doubt, with sparkling lights, invisible servants, rooms perhaps marked by indefinite and shifting boundaries and optical illusions, something ostentatiously magical. The reality was considerable more mundane—lavish, luxurious, but endlessly mundane—with no more obvious feeling of magic about it than the great hall of Castle Basil. I had no real chance to fully gauge the size of the place, inside or out, but it had to compare with some of the largest “stately” homes of England. The first room inside the front door was almost large enough to hold my parents’ Louisville house, garage, chimney, and all.

  The elflord’s son had already been taken beyond that room. I didn’t know where. The elflord and I went off to the left, to a relatively small room, one that was only about forty feet square. The chandeliers and candelabra made the room as bright as day. The walls held paintings and plaques. There were statues standing in the corners.

  “Please sit,” Xayber said, pointing me at a very comfortable-looking ehair by a large fireplace—everything about the place was large, including the chair. It was built for someone a couple of feet taller than me. But I managed. I slipped off the rigs for my “elf swords and sat, holding the weapons across my legs. My feet barely reached the floor.

  Xayber took a similar chair a few feet away and angled toward mine. The only weapon he showed was a long dagger with a jeweled hilt, more or less the equivalent of the monogrammed breast-pocket handkerchief in parts beyond the world I was born in.

  The heat from the fireplace was welcome.

  “There’s really no point in setting out before dawn, unless you’ve learned to see like an elf,” Xayber said after a silence that must have lasted all of five minutes.

  I shook my head. “That magic is not mine.”

  “Some wine?” Xayber gestured, and a servant entered the room immediately, carrying a gold tray with wine in a fancy crystal carafe and two matching goblets.

  There was no question of me refusing wine, or anything else. If Xayber intended harm, he had no need of subterfuge.

  “Where do I head from here?” I asked after I had sampled the wine—sweet, but not too bad. Actually, it was probably a top vintage for its type; I’m just not crazy about sweet wines. I’d prefer a decent beer any time.

  “Due north, from anywhere,” Xayber said.

  “You mean it’s at the north pole?”

  “Not precisely, but if you were following a compass, you would need to follow it north, even from the north pole.”

  Right, that doesn’t make sense, but it was no more impossible than a lot of other things that I had encountered in Fairy and the buffer zone. I accepted Xayber’s statement as the literal truth.

  “What am I likely to meet along the way?”

  “Anything you could possibly imagine, and much that you couldn’t.” He gave me a self-conscious smile. “I’m sorry. I really can’t be more specific than that. It is simply not possible. You know some of the dangers of Fairy.” That was, I assumed, an oblique reference to my earlier foray along the Isthmus of Xayber. “The deeper into our territory you go, the more common are the hazards, especially to outsiders. The hazards are stronger and stranger. In the lands beyond Fairy, even that is no sure guide. You will likely face hazards that no one has ever seen before, that may not have existed before your arrival. That is the nature of the region, if it can be said to have a nature … if it can even rightly be called a region.” He paused and lifted his wineglass in my direction.

  “And you have the added handicap of the recent and intense hatred of the Great Earth Mother.”

  “You don’t think I can even reach her, let alone do what I have to do then,” I said. I didn’t bother to make it a question.

  “No, but you are the only chance.” He stared at me for a moment, then closed his eyes and stared some more. I had no doubt that he was still looking at me, still seeing something.

  “But then,” he said after another long silence, “I imagine that it had to be like this when the time came. Your people have some legend about a Golden Age returning. A Golden Age you were supposed to initiate simply by being both King and Hero of Varay.” I nodded when he hesitated. “Perhaps some garbling of the truth is necessary over so many generations of mortals.”

  “You mean that instead of just bringing back the Golden Age of Vara, reuniting the titles had to bring back the chaos that he ended?” I asked.

  “That is certainly how it has worked out, anyway,” Xayber said.

  It was as I had guessed, but having my fear confirmed didn’t make me feel any better. Talk about your monumental screwups. Like that party game where the host or hostess whispers a story to one guest and the tale has to pass through everyone at the party and the final result is compared with the original story. At a party, the evolution of a simple story into something that bears little if any resemblance to the original is a gas. Translated to reality on this kind of scale, it loomed as the ultimate tragedy.

  “Then, along with everything else, the only way to get to this new Golden Age is for me to manage what Vara did, despite the difficulties.”

  “My memory may be failing me, but I do seem to see some resemblance to Vara in you. Perhaps, despite everything my mind tells me”, you do have some chance.”

  “You remember Vara?”

  “The memories fade in time, or they would not be bearable,” Xayber said, closing his eyes again. “Vara, or the one before him.” He shrugged and opened his eyes to stare at me again. “This is not the first universe that has ended.”

  “And you have survived the chaos before?”

  “What do the legends of Varay say of the time before time?”

  “That the Great Earth Mother roamed the void until she found a mate she considered suitable. There is nothing about what she was roaming on or where the mate came from if there was nothing around before.”

  “You see the gaps then,” Xayber said, and I nodded.

  “But if nothing comes after the dissolution this time, no one will survive, not even the Great Earth Mother, in the long run.”

  It was Xayber’s turn to nod.

  “Yet you think she’ll kill the only chance for a continuation?”

  “Why should she worry about continuation?” Xayber asked. “An end is only an end, not the bleakest of prosp
ects for one whose memories go back too far.”

  I understood less about the elflord with every sentence he uttered. This was the man (or whatever he was in essence) who had tried so diligently to kill me? Who had sent his son to kill me after he failed to do it directly? Who had made a career of trying to conquer Varay? He was starting to sound a little like Uncle Parthet.

  “You should eat before you leave,” the elflord said, an invitation that didn’t particularly surprise me. “My servants will have a meal prepared and waiting for us now.”

  We both stood. I carried my sword rigs in my left hand. Xayber led the way to a dining room that could have fed the entire population of a large university dormitory. The table was a good thirty yards long, without exaggeration. The sides were lined with chairs, but only two places had been set, together, at one end of the table. As we entered through one doorway, a stream of servants entered from another over to our left.

  This meal was even more of a feast than a meal at Castle Basil. Since we were deep in Fairy, a land even more bound up in magic than the buffer zone, the caloric demands made on residents were even greater. There was a wide variety of food, and to be honest, most of it tasted better than the best fare served in Varay. The plates were something even finer than the finest china I had come across in my world, delicate, almost translucent. The silverware was real silver, the goblets crystal and gold with decorations of rubies, emeralds, and diamonds. I doubted that any of it was fake.

  Xayber kept me company, talking enough to prevent any long silences, yet he still managed to eat more than I packed away. I did myself proud, though, cramming in the equivalent of three or four Thanksgiving dinners, even though I had eaten a full meal just before leaving Castle Basil, and an equally full breakfast just a few hours before that. Back in the real world, that kind of gluttony could have proved quickly fatal. In Fairy, it scarcely gave me a bloated feeling.

  “It is nearly dawn,” Xayber said as the meal wound down. I was still eating, but just forcing the food in now, a small cache against days of light rations to come. I nodded. There were no windows in the dining room, and the elflord certainly hadn’t consulted a watch or clock, but I didn’t doubt what he said.

  “I should leave as quickly as possible,” I said.

  He nodded. “I have been thinking. Before you leave, there is one thing that may give us both some idea of your chances for success.”

  “That sounds like it might be a dangerous thing to know,” I said.

  He watched my face for a moment before he said, “If you would rather not know?”

  I paused before I answered this time also. “There’s a saying back in my old world, ‘Where ignorance’ is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.’ But I don’t think that I could possibly have lower expectations than I do now. I have no objections, if it’s something you want to know.”

  “You turn my question back on me,” Xayber said, sounding surprised, as if no one had ever done that to him before. “Very well. I can see now why my son chose to help you.” I took that as a compliment. I’m not certain why. “We shall put it to the test then.”

  “What kind of test?” I asked, suddenly feeling a stab of caution.

  “Merely to gaze upon yourself in a mirror.”

  Despite my nervousness, I had to fight back the impulse to crack a joke about that being hazardous enough without magic.

  “Where is this mirror?” I asked. Maybe I was looking for an out. Even without knowing exactly what Xayber expected me to see, I was working up a real fear about it.

  “Here in the house. Not too long a walk.”

  I stood up and moved away from the table to hook up my sword rigs. That was easier than continuing to carry two six-foot swords around. “Then we might as well get it done so I can make my start.”

  “Yes. There is a need for some haste now that light approaches.”

  The elflord’s idea of a short walk turned out to be a little different from my own. This one turned out to be something like playing three holes of golf. He kept his strides short enough to avoid making me run to keep up with him, but we didn’t dally. We left the dining hall and went along a corridor, then up a grand staircase past the second floor to the third, headed down another corridor that was even longer than the one below, turned, then went up another staircase—a tight circular staircase that seemed designed to snag my swords every other step—into a small room with windows on two adjacent walls.

  “The mirror,” Xayber said with a gesture toward the corner of the two walls without windows.

  Mirrors. Plural. It looked like a deluxe version of one of those three-panel mirrors that they have in clothing stores, front view flanked by two angled mirrors to let you see more of the garment you’re trying on.

  I stepped in front of the mirrors, and the elflord started doing a little chanting of the conjuring sort. It was a fairly long chant, but I could tell that something was happening almost from the start of the spell. The mirrors fogged over, or under, since the fog seemed to be within the mirror, not on the glass.

  The panel on the right cleared first. I focused on that panel and saw myself. There was nothing at all unusual about the image. It was just me, the way I would expect to see myself in any mirror—all decked out in my questing garb.

  When the panel on the left cleared, I almost jumped. It wasn’t me in the mirror, though the image duplicated my moves perfectly—like the Marx Brothers’ mirror sequence in Duck Soup. The face looked familiar, somewhat, enough to start me glancing back and forth between that image and my own face in the panel on the right.

  “Who?” I asked, though I already suspected the answer.

  The elflord didn’t confirm my guess directly. He continued to chant, and then the center panel started to clear, and it showed a double exposure, me and this other person.

  “Almost a perfect match,” the elflord said softly. “He was considerably taller and heavier, but still … it appears that you are Vara’s true heir.”

  “This other guy here. That’s Vara?”

  “It is,” the elflord said. “Vara as I remember him.”

  Not quite the figure I had seen in my dreams of the Congregation of Heroes, but not totally different either.

  “The Great Earth Mother thought that I was him for a moment, after I got the second ball,” I told Xayber, thinking about the confrontation with her apparition in the shrine out in the Mist.

  “Perhaps you do have a chance,” Xayber said, but still without any real confidence in his voice. All three images faded from the mirrors, leaving panels that showed the room behind me but didn’t show me.

  “There is only one more piece of advice I can give you for this quest,” Xayber said. “When you get beyond Fairy into the nebulous regions beyond, if a time comes when reality seems to flee completely and you can find no other anchor to hang on to, reach down with both hands, grab what you have of Vara’s, and hold on with all your might. Your rings on the jewels may help you win through the moment.”

  Yeah, what a fine public pose that would be for a Hero.

  15

  North

  The sun was resting on the horizon when I caught a glimpse of the dirty red ball out a window while the elflord was leading me from the room with the mirrors down to the front courtyard. Most of the courtyard was still in shadow. The eastern wing of the manor hid the sun. The morning felt even chillier than the night had been. I didn’t see any frost or ice on the ground, but it wouldn’t have surprised me.

  “You will need two solid days of riding to clear my demesne,” Xayber said after I mounted Electrum. “You should be relatively safe until then. All of my subjects know that you travel with my countenance, and there are no outsiders within my borders.” He shrugged. “In these times, that is subject to change. Your danger sense will have to guide you.”

  “And after I leave your lands?” I asked.

  “There is no safety beyond.” He said that so flatly that I shivered. I tried to blame that on the cold but kn
ew better.

  “Any idea how long this trek will take me?”

  “Till the end of time,” Xayber said. He sure had a way with words. Much more of that kind of talk and I would have headed south.

  “Then I had better get started,” I said.

  Xayber nodded and pointed north. I started riding. Before I could go north, though, I had to go around the house, and a series of linked outbuildings.

  Riding alone over long distances can do strange things to the mind. I learned that on the ride north from the elflord’s. It’s a special kind of solitude. You talk to yourself. You talk to your horse. You retreat inside yourself, viewing the world around you as out of a bubble, like the Starchild at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. You register your surroundings, after a fashion, but seldom recall details—only of the most extraordinary moments, especially when danger seems particularly close. There is more the constant feeling of the saddle against your butt, jarring and chafing; the cramps in your fingers from holding the reins, even loosely; the smell of sweat, the horse’s and your own, even in cool air.

  I had been riding Electrum for more than two years, if not exclusively. I knew how strong he was, had some idea of his endurance, though I had never ridden him as hard as I would have to on this trek. At six years of age, Electrum was in his prime. He gave what I asked, and took what I offered. He knew his job. And he knew when it was time to stop for a break.

  Altogether, we managed about fifteen hours of riding that first day, from shortly after dawn until long past dusk. Five moons, even in the first quarter, provide considerable light on a clear night, enough to cast strong shadows, enough to let a rider pick out a path with considerable confidence.