The Hero King

by Rick Shelley

  My horses didn’t like the smells or the noises in the jungle. They were restless all night, sometimes waking me even when my danger sense wasn’t active.

  I got up as soon as there was any hint of light in the jungle and fixed breakfast. The horses settled down a little then. I don’t know if they were lulled by the resumption of familiar routine or if they just knew that breakfast meant that we would soon be moving away from this place where they were so nervous.

  There’s no real drama to riding through a forest like that—if all you have is the forest. With no underbrush and with all the tall trees reaching to get to the sunlight before they start to put out branches, you don’t even have to worry much about bumping your head on anything. It’s as safe and comfortable as riding down the center aisle of a cathedral. Sure, it’s spooky with the light dimmed and tinted green, with the thick smells, but the jungle itself is just a collection of trees. It’s the animals that provide the danger, and the sound effects. Dawn brought a lot of noise, especially from the canopy, from animals or birds I couldn’t see or hope to identify by call … and by the occasional splattering of waste being dropped from high branches.

  Compass out, I started us off toward the north again. There were individual trees that had to be detoured around, but it was nothing like the forest of thorn trees where I had no choice but to follow a narrow, twisting path. Here, there was more path than forest.

  About midmorning, I saw my first large dinosaur, one of the really huge ones, in the shallow water at the edge of an even larger pond. The water wasn’t in my way, and the dinosaur, a brontosaur or something similar to my nonexpert eyes, showed no inclination to climb out of the water to investigate me. In size, even the brontosaur was nothing compared to the dragons I had faced close-up and personal.

  The main event in the jungle didn’t start until after noon.

  In this corner, Gil Tyner, Hero and King. In the other corner, a whole damn family of Triceratops. The two little ones were each the size of Electrum. Mama was about three times as big and must have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed that morning. Or maybe Triceratops dinosaurs were habitually in a bad mood, like rhino.

  “Hey, lady, let’s make a deal,” I called out. “You don’t bother me and I won’t bother you.”

  She lowered her head so those three giant spikes were aimed directly at me and charged about three steps. Electrum and Geezer went into reverse just as quickly. When Mama T stopped, so did my horses. The big Triceratops pawed the ground. The two small ones did the same. I started looking for the emergency exit. At the moment, those dinosaurs looked a lot less vulnerable than any of the full-grown dragons I had seen, though some of them could have eaten Mama T in one gulp.

  I tugged on Electrum’s reins to shift him toward the right. We started moving slowly, all of our eyes on the armored nasties. And they were watching us just as closely. One of the small ones did a mock charge, coming a little closer to us than Mama had. Then the other small one had to show its bravery.

  Well, there comes a time for bravery, when you have to swallow all the fear and insanity and “do what a man has to do.” But as far as I was concerned, that wasn’t it. As soon as we had a little room, I put my heels to Electrum and we exercised the better part of valor. We ran like hell.

  Maybe I was finally learning how to be a smart Hero.

  * * *

  It was getting dark inside the jungle when we reached the edge. Beyond, the ground started upward, gently at first, then more steeply to another ridge, perhaps twice as high as the one we had descended on the southern side of the jungle. I spotted a cozy-looking ledge about a third of the way up and decided that we would spent the night there. Twilight was almost wasted before we got up to the ledge and started to settle in for the night. I still had a little wood left after reclaiming most of what I had used for the picket fence in the jungle, and the air was still fairly comfortable up on the ledge, thanks to a warm upflow of air from the valley. I fixed supper and got ready for a good night’s sleep. There didn’t seem to be any need for the tent, so I just wrapped up in my blankets and stared into the sky. I felt pretty good after escaping another of the traps in my path. Put the white feathers on me and teach me to crow. I didn’t give a damn. I knew there would be sufficient Hero work ahead. There was no need to take chances that didn’t have to be taken.

  I counted moons again as they appeared one after the other. The good feeling ended quickly when I saw that a sixth moon had joined the parade.

  Time had taken another bite out of its own vitals.

  16

  Her Central Temple

  The horses needed time to sleep, to rest, and so did I—an eternity or more. But it looked like I might get it sooner than I wanted. There were six moons in the sky at the same time, each showing the familiar patterns of the one moon that should have been there. Together, six full moons reflected a lot of light, soft but bright, enough to read by—if I had had anything to read.

  Six moons also meant that there was no chance that I would sleep that night. One more moon and it was all over, even without Milliways, and I didn’t know how much time I had left, how much time everyone had left, before the celestial parade was complete. Moon number seven might not appear for two or three weeks, or it might show up tomorrow night. As far as I had been able to determine, there were no regular intervals between new arrivals in the sky. The central temple of the Great Earth Mother was still somewhere farther to the north, and I couldn’t be sure how much farther, how many days—and nights—of riding it would take for me to reach it. I just had to keep plodding along as quickly as I could, hoping to get there in time. Averting total catastrophe when, or if, I got there was another problem, still too far off to take the primary position in my catalog of worries.

  Sleep? Not only did I have to face that night without sleep, there was a chance that I would never sleep again, not until the entire universe came to an end.

  But I had to rest, and I had to give Electrum and Geezer some time. Even if I was a veteran, certified Hero, I couldn’t go on forever without stopping, and the horses were just horses. They would give what they had, but there were limits.

  Six full moons in the sky. There would be plenty of light to ride all night once we started again. I figured that we had to rest for at least three hours before we resumed the almost hopeless quest. Three hours of fidgeting, staring at those moons.

  “You’ll just drop off sooner or later,” I mumbled. “You can’t go that long without sleep. It just isn’t possible.”

  I shrugged. “Well, maybe I’ll be able to doze in the saddle when I get that far gone.” But the horses would probably be stumbling from exhaustion by then.

  I once read—in some book of criticism I had been assigned to read in some literature class, I think—that the typical hero was always portrayed as a guy who was all balls and no brains … or words to that effect. The irony of that had to grate with me carrying around a spare set of the former, and maybe not using all of the latter.

  “We’ve got to keep trying,” I mumbled, pulling my blankets tighter around me. It was warm on that ledge above the jungle, but I couldn’t get warm enough, even though I was sweating.

  After a few minutes, I closed my eyes and pulled the bill of my Cubs cap down to shut out some of the glare of all those moons. Even though I couldn’t blank my mind enough for sleep, I tried to steer my thoughts to pleasant memories—to times I had shared with Joy, not nearly enough of those; to epic drinking bouts with Lesh and Uncle Parthet; to long conversations with Parthet and Pregel; to all of the fun my father and I had while I was growing up, before I learned of the deception. But I had trouble holding on to happy memories. It wasn’t a good time for nostalgia. It wasn’t a good time for much of anything. All that was lacking for an atmosphere of total gloom and resignation was a soundtrack from Wagner. Maybe the Valkyries would ride to carry me to Valhalla or some such place when the end came. If even a place like Valhalla could survive the total destruction
that threatened.

  I had my bouts with wishful thinking in the night too. Perhaps the temple was just beyond the next ridge. Perhaps the Great Earth Mother would let bygones be bygones the way the Elflord of Xayber had—you know, shoulders to the wheel, let’s all work together in this crisis, and all of the other clichés that come up when the shit is ready to hit the fan—so we could get right to the important work.

  Work? Being a Hero was starting to sound a lot like being a prostitute.

  Maybe, better yet, maybe I would wake up and find that it was all a dream, like that year of Dallas. Maybe I had snapped under the pressures of my senior year at Northwestern and all of my memories of the last forty-four months or so were merely delusions.

  Yeah, and maybe I was just starting to crack up now, and all of creation would go down the drain because the only Hero with the balls to do the job didn’t have the balls to do the job—to mix the literal and the figurative.

  Somewhere in the night, I remembered what the Elflord of Xayber said that I should do if I felt reality starting to slip away from me. I reached down under my blankets with both hands and held on, trying to save whatever link to sanity I might still have. Four balls all in a bag, hold ‘em and roll ‘em and …

  The elflord’s advice didn’t seem nearly as ludicrous as it had when he said it.

  Exhaustion and worry, the feeling that I was on a hopeless and hopelessly quixotic quest, and loneliness—maybe I was flirting with the edge of insanity that night. Time swirled around and through me; “Where it stops, no one knows.”

  I had a moment of extreme lucidity and realized that I had been sitting there rocking back and forth the way some people do who have been locked up in mental institutions too long. I opened my eyes. No such luck. I wasn’t safe in a nut house. I was crouched on a ledge, partway up the side of a hill, somewhere in the uncharted regions beyond Fairy.

  The sixth moon was directly overhead, so I got up and got ready to ride. Both horses whinnied their disapproval of the decision, but they didn’t mutiny, so we continued up the slope, away from the anomalous Cretaceous jungle toward who could say what next terror.

  There was no temple visible when we reached the crest. I didn’t realize how fervently I had hoped for that until I felt the flood of disappointment when I looked north from the crest. North of us, there was another plain, not more than twenty feet below the ridge. There appeared to be a similar ridgeline several miles away. I couldn’t be completely sure of the distance, not even with all of the moonlight.

  “I hope this isn’t another treadmill,” I said as we moved down toward the plain. That would have defeated us without any doubt.

  It wasn’t a treadmill, but before we had gone fifty yards across the flat ground, I knew that there was something equally strange about it, something that slowed the horses almost as much as the treadmill had, something that annoyed and frightened them no end. We stopped and I dismounted. My feet sank in the ground to my ankles, but no farther. When I lifted my feet, they came up clean, but there was a sucking sort of pressure. I squatted. Electrum’s legs were sunk in the stuff above his hoofs. I felt the ground. It was like a very soft, semiliquid rubber. It molded itself to hand or foot but didn’t cling. Like gooey mud without the goo.

  “Just a nuisance,” I said softly. I got up to try to reassure the horses. I stroked their heads and talked easily to them. “I know, it’s a drain on energy, and you don’t have all that much pep left. We’ll just have to put up with it for now. This plain doesn’t look all that wide. Maybe we can be out of this stuff by dawn.”

  I drew Wellivazey’s swords and probed the rubbery ground with it. I could sink the blade in almost to the hilt with very little effort. It came out just as easily as my feet did, without a hint of clinging dirt. I got down on one knee and sank a hand into the ground. It felt like rubbery jelly. If I really pressed, put all of my strength into it, I could get my hand, even my arm, down into it, about halfway to the elbow. The stuff below had the same kind of texture, it was just thicker, firmer.

  I shook my head as I climbed back into the saddle. The obstacles on this trek seemed designed more to test my sanity and my threshold of boredom than my strength or bravery.

  “I think I’m missing something here, kids,” I said. “I just can’t figure out what it is.” If there actually was something more subtle going on, maybe I really was the hero who was all balls and no brains, too dense to puzzle it out. If the Great Earth Mother was really the Big Bad Mama she was cracked up to be, she ought to be able to show a little more power.

  Of course, even with the piddling tests that had been thrown in front of me, I was almost out of it. If I hadn’t been so thoroughly exhausted by then, I might have felt some humiliation.

  The rubbery plain slowed us more than I had guessed, whether because the horses were so tired, the gumbo was so thick, or the plain was wider than I first thought, I’m not sure. It may have been a combination of any or all of those. But we moved on steadily through the night. Several times my danger sense hiccupped and I saw low shadows moving—or thought I did. But the shadows didn’t come close and I couldn’t make out what they might be.

  By dawn, I was so tired that I had trouble keeping my eyes open. The rubber plain was a slate gray and there looked to be a little more than a mile left of it. At the slow walk that seemed to be the most efficient pace for the horses in it, we would need another twelve or fifteen minutes to get to the ridge ahead of us … with no real guarantee that the ridge marked the end of this slop.

  Then I saw another of those shadows on the plain. With sunlight playing on the ground, the shadow was low, triangular, and black, moving almost directly toward us, cutting through the rubber surface without any difficulty at all. It looked exactly like a shark fin cutting through the surface of the ocean. The way my danger sense started ringing my head as the shadow came closer, I was ready to concede that it was a shark—some weird variety that could swim through semiliquid rubber almost as quickly as its marine cousins could swim through water.

  There was no Jaws theme in the background, getting louder as the shark approached. The fin came on, changing direction to come straight at me. Off to the side, a couple of hundred yards away, I saw three more fins, idling, I guess, moving in lazy circles. I pulled Dragon’s Death and urged the horses on toward the ridge … and what I hoped was the end of the rubbery “ocean.” I watched the first shark as it came on, and I turned Electrum at the last second, leaned over, and slashed at the front of the fin. My sword slowed drastically when it hit the rubber, fighting through the surface, losing much of the force of my blow.

  But there was still enough juice behind it to wound the shark, to make it break surface.

  It opened gaping jaws to shows rows and rows of flat needlelike teeth. My second blow shortened the snout by a foot, and blood flowed onto and into the gray rubber surface. Off in the distance, the other sharks quickly caught the scent of blood and homed in on it. I gave Electrum my heels and he tried to gallop. The result was an awkward, bouncing run like a carousel horse gone out of control, but we were moving faster than the remaining sharks, and that was all that mattered. Two of them continued toward the blood and the thrashing of the shark I had wounded. The last shark changed course to try to intercept us.

  The race was close, but we got out of the goop onto firm, sandy soil with maybe two seconds to spare.

  Okay, stick another white feather in my cap. I had run from danger again. I was getting to like it. But I also felt that I had to make a gesture, more than the shark I had given the nose job to. That was unavoidable, not heroics. I dismounted and walked back to the edge of the goop. The shark that had tried to intercept us was circling right close to the shore (I guess I have to call it that). I drew Dragon’s Death again and waited for him. When he was as close as he could get, I stabbed down with my six-foot elf sword—stabbed rather than slashed this time-aiming for that same point just in front of the fin. The shark struggled for a moment, and I pulled
my sword out. The shark went belly up in a hurry, and drew the other two, with more fins visible in the distance, coming on at full speed.

  I didn’t wait. I had made my gesture, thumbed my nose at convention.

  When we got to the top of the ridge north of the shark pond, I rudely reined Electrum to a halt and dismounted in such a hurry that I almost fell, not quite getting my foot clear of the stirrup. When I got to the ground, I dropped to my knees. It wasn’t an act of faith. It wasn’t prayer. More likely, it was disbelief. I couldn’t quite accept what I was seeing.

  I could see the shrine, the central temple of the Great Earth Mother.

  This time, I know I cried, and I couldn’t do anything but let the tears come until there were no more left to shed. Then I looked to the sky, fearing some final cruel trick by fate, the appearance of the seventh moon, showing up just soon enough to torture me at coming so close.

  There were no moons at all in the sky at the moment. The sixth had set just before dawn.

  The temple was still some distance away—at least ten miles, I figured, perhaps more. It was at the far end of a very large, very flat valley. The temple was up on a broad shelf a little above the valley floor. The only thing I had to base my estimate of distance on was a rough guess that the central temple had to be at least as large as the two shrines that had held the balls of the Great Earth Mother. That would make the shelf that the temple sat on approximately two miles wide and deep. The temple certainly looked like it had been fashioned from the same basic design, at least on the outside, a pseudo-Greek temple with rows of columns around it.