The Hero King

by Rick Shelley

  Five moons passed overhead, or rather, somewhat to the south, one after the other, getting closer to the full.

  By morning, I was shaking with the cold, miserable, and just about soured on the whole business. The only problem was that there was no alternative to pressing on to the bitter end—and I couldn’t have been more convinced that the end would be bitter, from the cold, if nothing else.

  A little before noon, my fourteenth day out from the estate of the Elflord of Xayber, the scraggly little thorn jungle came to an end the same way it had started, bounded by a puny trickle of water. I was anxious to get away from the arthritic thorn trees, but I still reined in Electrum to sit and look out at the new vista before we crossed the creek.

  Solid trees south of the water; not a tree in sight north of it … very little of anything, actually. The plain was barren to the horizon around half of the compass. Only a little thin grass grew in the sandy, or gravelly, soil. It looked as though it would crunch underfoot. “Miles and miles of miles and miles,” came to mind. I had no idea where I first came across that phrase. I still don’t.

  “Well, Geezer, I hope you feel up to carrying an extra load for a while. I think we’re going to have to carry enough wood for our next few campfires with us.”

  Geezer didn’t answer, which was just as well. A talking horse wouldn’t have helped my nerves a bit. Geezer’s load had been getting gradually lighter as we traveled. Each meal I ate lightened his burden a bit. I got busy and chopped down a bunch of little thorn trees. I had been wearing lined gloves and my parka against the cold, but chopping wood warmed me enough to do without them for quite a while. I built a fire and heated a couple of meal packs for lunch, then got busy baling wood to take along. I had no way to know how far the next suitable fuel might be, so I kept going until Geezer was carrying as much as he could handle.

  The horses grazed and drank while I worked and ate. They were both ready to move on by the time I was.

  Riding across a flat, barren plain did offer one nice bonus that made up for a lot of shortcomings. I would see any approaching threat with plenty of time to plan a response … unless it materialized right on top of me, of course. The reverse was also true. Any threat would see me with a lot of warning, but I didn’t consider that to be much of a flaw. The only threats I anticipated would come from the Great Earth Mother, and I was already certain that she knew just where to find me.

  The only outside threat, unconnected with my present mission, that is, might be a dragon, and no dragons had been spotted (at least not over Varay) since the herd of them rained out of the sky when I scarfed down the balls of the Great Earth Mother. Dragons. I wished that there were dragons around that people could ride, something straight out of Pern. That would have taken much of the drudgery out of the Hero work.

  I took a compass bearing when we crossed the creek. Without reference points, I expected to consult the compass quite often, but at least I wouldn’t have to worry about the vagaries of a twisting forest path out on the empty plain. I could aim north, hold the heading without any trouble, and be able to make much better time.

  That’s what I thought, anyway.

  About a half hour after we started on the plain (and yes, the rough soil did crunch underfoot), I looked back to get some perspective on our progress. That damn forest looked like it was no more than a couple of football fields away, and that was ridiculous. We had been riding at a brisk walk the whole time.

  “Optical illusion,” I muttered, and I started us north again, maybe at a trot for a few minutes now and then.

  The next time I looked back, we might have been a quarter mile from the forest, still nowhere near as far off as we should have been.

  “I think something’s wrong,” I said, having sudden flashbacks to my first nightmare visit to the Congregation of Heroes. In that, I had climbed the stairs from the crypt up to the living levels of Castle Basil without making anywhere near the progress I should have.

  And in the Titan Mountains, the maze guarding the first shrine had refused to get any closer as we walked toward it, until I closed my eyes and damn near walked into a wall.

  I got down off of Electrum and looked around, then knelt to grab a handful of the gravel and sand. It felt normal. I’ve been on beaches with that kind of mixture, up above the high-water line. I held out my arms, aimed back at the forest, and sighted past my thumb, the way you see artists doing it—at least on TV and in the movies. I held my thumb so it covered one tree. After a couple of minutes, the edges of the tree started to appear from behind my thumb.

  That really wasn’t what I expected.

  “The ground’s sliding back toward the forest,” I announced. Well, sometimes Electrum almost seemed to know what I was saying.

  We had made some progress away from the forest while we were moving, but every minute we stayed in one place, we lost ground because the ground was moving south. A slow treadmill. We had to move north faster than it moved south to get anywhere.

  I mounted Electrum again and pushed it—canter, trot, walk, canter. I kept the horses going as fast as I dared, using the walk sparingly, as a rest, trying to keep Electrum and Geezer speeding along as much as possible. We did make noticeable progress, but there was no sign of any relief to the north, no promise of any end to the treadmill. The motion of the ground wasn’t pronounced enough to feel, but in a ten-minute break, we might lose close to a hundred yards. We didn’t take many breaks. And I refused to even think of stopping for longer than ten minutes until we got clear of the mess. A good supper and a night’s sleep might put us all the way back at the forest, and I couldn’t bear to think of wasting an entire day and facing the same challenge the next morning.

  The day seemed longer than it had any right to be, especially so far north at that time of year. November. So far north? Latitude isn’t really the same in Fairy and the buffer zone as it is back in the other world. It’s not like saying you cross from Canada into the buffer zone and then Fairy in the far north, nothing like that. The climate in Varay is beautiful. Winters are short and mild, the summers don’t get extremely hot. It’s really too ideal for anywhere in the “real” world, though there are certainly enough tourist boards and chambers of commerce that claim that sort of climate. There is some relationship between distance north and weather in the buffer zone and beyond, just not as much as back home. I hoped that the general rule continued to hold in the lands north of Fairy. Each increasingly cold night cooled my optimism, though.

  We rode. Every so often, I looked at my compass and made sure that we were still heading due north. If the ground could slide south under us, it might also be able to get us turned around. More often, I looked back over my shoulder. At a very rough estimate, we were sliding two steps back for every three we took forward. The entire day passed like that. I didn’t stop for meals, didn’t stop for anything but the most essential of personal needs and to rest the horses for a few minutes when I feared that they couldn’t go on without a stop.

  I watched five moons come up, one by one, getting near the full. We kept riding. Our pace fell off, but I figured that we were still managing a little forward progress. But even if we had been doing nothing but staying in place, we had to keep moving, keep trying, to keep from losing ground.

  It was a long night after a long day. At times I got down and walked to give Electrum a little relief. I thought about discarding some of Geezer’s burdens, dumping some of the wood I had packed up, but that seemed too desperate a measure to take yet. There might be weeks left to travel, and the items I might dump now could be the ones that would make the vital difference later, whether I abandoned wood or anything else.

  The moons crossed the sky and started to set. I was so exhausted that I could hardly keep my eyes open even when I was on the ground walking in front of my horses. A few more hours of this treadmill and all the determination in the world wouldn’t be enough to keep us going even fast enough to stay in place. It would be so much easier to camp, to promise mys
elf that it would only be for an hour, just long enough to get a little real sleep and to rest the horses. But that kind of promise is too easy to break. One hour becomes two. Two becomes four, and four hours might easily cost us every inch we had gained in a long day and night of effort.

  We kept trudging north, into the brief interlude of dark following the setting of the fifth moon and the start of dawn.

  I stumbled and fell flat on my face. I felt movement under my chest. I slid my hands around. The edge! The gritting sand seemed to be coming out from under something. The ground beyond was stationary, as far as I could tell. The spot where I fell was like the start of an escalator, where the steps come out from under a platform.

  I nearly cried with relief.

  Maybe the “nearly” could be struck from that.

  Right along the boundary, the ground was the same on both sides, the coarse mixture of sand and gravel. But it started to change quickly once we were free of the treadmill, less grit and more real dirt mixed in, and more grass growing out. My horses and I were too spent to travel far beyond the boundary, but edges make me nervous. They’re too easy to fall off of.

  We lost more than half a day there, not fifty yards from the boundary. I didn’t even bother to fix myself a meal before I pitched my tent and crawled in to sleep. I got the horses taken care of, hooked together on a long picket line staked to the ground where they could graze to their hearts’ content without straying back into the moving zone of ground. There was water just within their reach as well, another trickling little creek, this one wandering crookedly from northeast to southwest—not a straight boundary creek like those that had bracketed the forest.

  Judging from the sky, it was nearly noon before I woke and took a good look at the land around and ahead. I built a fire, then got water and several meal packs on to heat, then trudged to the top of a low ridge just north of us to have a good look at the next stretch.

  We had stopped in a good place. Beyond that ridge, things started to get crazy again.

  The ground sloped away quickly into a wide valley north of the ridge. The valley seemed to be filled with a tropical jungle. And the few creatures I could see in the air above the jungle looked suspiciously like pterodactyls. These weren’t dragons, but even more primitive flying reptiles.

  I couldn’t see any way around the jungle either. It extended as far as I could see, east to west.

  “Okay, I guess it’s time to do the Professor Challenger bit,” I mumbled. At least it looked warm in the jungle, wherever the heat to power it came from. I packed my coat and gloves. It was still chilly out in the open where I was, so I didn’t bother to shed the thermal long johns.

  “If I was sure we could get all the way through that in one day, we’d just stay here and rest up the rest of today,” I said. I was doing a lot of my talking out loud, even when I wasn’t talking directly at the horses. “But there’s no way to know that, so I guess we should get started today. You boys have seen dragons, so I doubt that there’ll be much in there to really give you a fright.”

  You have to understand. After dealing with dragons the size of the Love Boat, nothing out of the Age of Dinosaurs is going to give a regulation Hero or his steed much of a fright. Tyrannosaurus rex? The species only got to be about fifteen feet tall—a mere bagatelle, child’s play. And the really huge beasts of that age were all vegetarians, slow-moving, with peanut-sized brains. The only thing to fear from one of them would be if it tripped over its own feet and fell on you. If the advertising was correct.

  It did occur to me that those prehistoric jungles might have contained threats that didn’t leave such impressive remains—venomous bugs or slugs maybe, creatures that didn’t leave huge piles of bones around. For that matter, a toxic fungus might prove to be more dangerous than all the carnivorous dinosaurs that ever lived.

  “We can at Least get down to the edge of the jungle,” I said when I finally hoisted my saddle back on Electrum. “We’re still a few hours short on sleep from last night.”

  The slope down to the jungle was longer than I thought, which meant that the jungle itself was also more massive than it had appeared from the ridge. We spent nearly three hours going down the slope, angling back and forth to keep from edging into a headlong rush, because the slope was also steeper than I had thought at first. There was a breeze coming out of the jungle, soft, light, but full of wet, earthy smells, bringing with it a strong hint of warmth that had no business existing just north of a plain where the temperatures had been flopping back and forth across the freezing mark at night. I saw huge ferns in the moderate distance, and a lot of lush trees that looked like they would be uncomfortable with nightly lows even thirty degrees above freezing.

  There was a lot of movement inside the jungle, but at first I couldn’t tell if any of it was caused by the local fauna or if it was just the movement of the wind through the branches. I saw those flying reptiles from the ridge, but it wasn’t until we were well below the level of the jungle canopy that I saw anything else.

  The first animals I saw on the ground weren’t any of the giant dinosaurs that make such lovely movie monsters. The first dinosaurs I saw were about three feet tall, skinny and long-legged—maybe the Cretaceous version of the road runner. Beep, beep. They were running, and they looked as if they might be catching flying insects and eating them on the run. I stopped and watched them for a few minutes—from about a hundred yards away and up on the slope. Maybe they were full-grown, and maybe they were young, with Mama hanging by just out of sight. They ran around like kittens at play. But their long, narrow, tooth-filled snouts looked like they could take a decent hunk out of meat a lot bigger than a dragonfly.

  “I hope they sleep soundly,” I said when I started Electrum down the slope again. I toyed with the idea of setting up camp for the night outside the jungle, waiting until morning until I actually entered. If it hadn’t been for the cruising pterodactyls (or whatever they were), I probably would have done just that, parked right at the base of the slope. But the flying reptiles seemed to be doing their hunting out on the verge of the jungle, where they could get some speed into their dives … and see anything out in the open.

  Since I didn’t know which was the frying pan and which was the fire, I decided to get under cover of the jungle, where I could at least escape long-distance observation.

  It wasn’t just warm when we reached the bottom of the valley and moved under the cover of the jungle, it was downright hot, maybe fifty degrees warmer at dusk inside the forest then it had been at noon on the ridge just south of the valley.

  Dusk seemed to flick past in a matter of seconds inside the jungle. Sunset meant real darkness under a thick canopy. It was an exotic jungle, and only looked somewhat like a modern tropical rain forest. The soil seemed ridiculously poor and thin to be supporting so much, but I guess that’s the way those rain forests in Africa and South America are too, everything actively tied up in the ecosystem, depending on very tight recycling to keep it all going. There was a lot of rock in this forest, some of it barely covered by a few inches of soil, some of it sticking up in large knobs and low ridges. To support themselves, the trees had to depend on extensive systems of roots, many of them almost entirely aboveground, and various kind of natural buttresses. Thick vines coiled around trunks and led from one tree to the next, locking vast sections of the jungle together in a massive web. There was relatively little ground cover or underbrush. The trees and vines hoarded most of the available resources.

  About twenty minutes after we entered the jungle, I spotted a nook protected on three side by a hefty elbow-shaped rock and decided that it would make a dandy campsite, even if there was only one way out. That meant there was only one way in too, and I was more worried about large animals than I was about trolls or any other thinking enemies. I set aside part of the thornwood Geezer had been carrying to build a night-long fire, and used the rest to put up a half-assed barricade across the open side of the nook. Those thorns wouldn’t even inco
nvenience many of the saurians I had read about, but maybe it would slow up the little ones that I had actually seen. And maybe the fire would keep all of them back … if it didn’t attract them by its novelty. Dinosaurs weren’t covered in any of the survival manuals or camping guides Dad had made me study while I was growing up. Maybe dinosaurs wouldn’t know that animals are supposed to be frightened of fire.

  Somehow, I just knew that I was going to have to do battle with at least one of the monsters of the Dinosaur Age before I got through the jungle. I was a certified Hero, on a Mission. There had to be a battle to justify the set.

  I did sleep that night. I was still so exhausted from the treadmill plain that nothing could have kept me from getting some sleep. But my danger sense kept waking me. I heard crashing noises in the night, clear enough to assure me that there were some of the big dinosaurs around even though I hadn’t seen any before sunset. I slept sitting up, with my back against the rock outcropping, both of my elf swords on my lap, my hands on the hilts. During one drowsy period, halfway between sleep and waking, I found myself wondering which variety of dinosaur I would have to face. The two likely candidates that came to mind (there weren’t all that many that I knew by name) were Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus rex, both late Cretaceous types. T. rex would make for a more exciting spectator sport with its quick movements and huge mouth. Triceratops would be more difficult to dispatch, from the Hero’s point of view. Those three big horns on its head and the big armored flap stretching back to cover the neck would be a bitch to get past. I knew that there were many other kinds of dangerous or dangerous-looking dinosaurs, but if the dangers were as personalized as the falling Wrigley Field seemed to indicate, I felt relatively sure that it would be one of the two I could call by name. I thought that Triceratops was supposed to be a vegetarian, but it was sure equipped to fight. Hell, rhinoceroses are vegetarians, but they’re sure not house pets. If I lost to any of these dinosaurs, it wouldn’t matter much to me if I was on the supper menu or not.