The Hero of Varay

by Rick Shelley

  Cayenne doesn’t even pretend at being fancy. It’s just a simple circular tower, sixty-five feet high and fifty in diameter, with crenelated parapets. There’s no outer wall, no gatehouse, outbuildings, moat, or little turrets sticking up at corners. It’s just a single naked tower. Cayenne was built in a region of Varay that had little to fear from outside invasion. The rationale was that it would help control bandits in the area—the foothills of the Titan Mountains—and there was little trouble with bandits any longer.

  Joy and I climbed to the roof to start our tour of the castle. The roof has my water tank, a small shelter for a sentry (though I had never bothered to post a sentry since I took over the place), racks of spears and bins of arrows, and a small stack of stones for hurling down at attackers who had never come. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that some of those stones had been sitting there since the castle was first built.

  The time difference between Chicago and Varay meant that it was still light out when Joy and I climbed to the top of Cayenne. Sunset was nearly a half hour off and we had a good view of the surrounding countryside—forest and low, rolling hills, with the mountains off in the distance, to the south.

  “It’s not Kansas, not even Chicago,” I said. Joy nodded and tightened her grip on my arm. “To the south, those are the Titan Mountains, supposedly an impassable barrier with nothing beyond them.” I pointed. “Everything else you can see is southern Varay.”

  “If the mountains weren’t so high, it might almost be Kentucky or Tennessee, maybe even the Ozarks,” Joy said softly. Her voice still sounded shaky, but not as bad as before.

  “Pretty much,” I agreed. “The mountains are much higher, though, even higher than the Rockies. Maybe even up close to the Himalayas. But they are mountains. Maybe that’s why I like this part of the country.” Well, the terrain and the fact that it was about as far from the Isthmus of Xayber as I could get in Varay. According to Parthet and everyone else I consulted, the power of an elflord diminished in some kind of strict proportion to the distance from Fairy and his demesne.

  The sixth floor of Cayenne, the first one below the roof, holds living quarters for the small live-in staff and my “retinue,” Lesh, Harkane, and Timon. The fifth floor holds my private apartments—bedroom, sitting room, bathroom. The fourth floor has a small office, but most of the level is set aside for weapons practice; call it a gymnasium. The third floor is Cayenne’s version of a great hall—not particularly great, but it takes up the entire level. The second floor has the scullery, larders, and various supply closets. The ground level is mostly a stable. The outer door is thick wood sheathed with metal, inside and out. Two wooden bars the size of railroad ties slide into metal brackets to lock the door. Other wooden bars could be propped against the door to give extra support, and outside there was a slight ramp leading down to grade, making it that much more difficult for attackers to batter down the door. A lockable wrought-iron gate across the bottom of the ramp was the final touch. There was no way to tell if the defenses were really adequate. They had never been fully tested.

  Joy and I didn’t go all the way down to the ground floor, though. We stopped in the great hall. It was suppertime. I don’t have a large staff, but Lesh had obviously passed the word that I had returned.

  “I’m starving,” Joy said when we smelled the food and saw the first trays being hauled up from the kitchen. I thought an appetite was a good sign.

  “Oh, yes,” I said, and then I laughed. “That’s something else about this place. You eat and eat and can’t possibly get fat. It’s a literal impossibility.”

  Joy giggled, and it sounded healthy rather than hysterical. I tried to hold back a sigh of relief.

  “Now, that’s what I call a proper fairy-tale world,” she said.

  We sat at the table and Timon rushed about to serve both of us. Joy was as upset at that kind of attention as I was when I first came to Varay, but I told her she would get used to it. … even though I had never really gotten comfortable with it myself and I usually told Timon to knock it off when we were “at home.” I didn’t permit any of the nonsense—two tables, servants eat “below the salt” or wait until afterward—at Cayenne that held most places in the buffer zone either. The cooks came out, and the two lads who helped Timon with the serving, Harkane, Lesh, and the six men-at-arms under Lesh’s command all sat at the table and we ate together. I introduced Joy to everyone.

  And everyone dug right into the food. I ate with my customary abandon, but I kept watching Joy put away food at the same time. She never ate much. She was short and thin and she always told me that she intended to stay thin. But she didn’t show any diet control at all during her first meal in Varay. She put away food, wine, and coffee—especially a lot of food. It is probably an exaggeration to say that she ate as much in that one meal as she had in the year and odd months that I had known her, but it is a tempting exaggeration.

  Timon loaded up our plates at the start of the meal, and whenever he happened to notice one of us getting low on anything, he tried to get around to replace it, but I kept waving him back to his seat. Even after three years, he couldn’t get it into his head that I really didn’t appreciate that kind of service at home. It might be socially required at Basil or elsewhere, but I didn’t want it in my own little place with no visiting big shots.

  Cayenne is a compact little community. My two cooks and most of the others who work in the castle live in the small village that sits alongside the creek a few hundred yards downstream from the castle. The guards are the only locals who come close to living in the castle, and three of them have families in the village. Cayenne village was founded to supply the castle and it was still doing that after more than a thousand years.

  The current population of Cayenne village was seventy-three.

  I was just getting to the point where I was almost full when Parthet came barging in—clomping down the stairs from the passage to Castle Basil. I started to invite him to sit down and eat, but he didn’t give me a chance.

  “Something extraordinary has happened,” he said, short of breath. “You’d better come along to Basil right now.”

  “Slow down, have a beer,” I said. It was unlike Parthet to pass up any opportunity to eat, no matter what the crisis.

  “No time. Come on, lad. This is urgent.” He appeared to notice Joy then. He smiled and winked at her. “Glad to see you finally made it here, my dear,” he said. Then he turned to me again. “What are you waiting for?”

  “Hang on. What’s this all about?” I had never seen Parthet refuse a beer before.

  “He says his name is Aaron.”

  4

  Aaron

  “Aaron?” I said. Beside me, Joy stopped eating and looked up at Parthet too. “What’s this all about?” I asked again.

  Parthet chuckled and shook his head. “I think you’d best see for yourself, lad. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Come on, Uncle. After three years of this place, even the Cheshire Cat wouldn’t surprise me.” I made a face. “Your timing could sure use some work.” Then I turned to Joy. “You want to wait here or come along?”

  “Come along to where?” Joy asked.

  “To Castle Basil, the capital.”

  “Through another one of those spooky doors?”

  “I’m afraid so. You don’t have to come if you don’t want to. You can wait here and get settled in if you prefer. I shouldn’t be gone too long. Right, Uncle?” I looked over at Parthet again.

  “Probably not, lad, probably not.” He was still chuckling. Whoever Aaron was, he sure had Parthet tickled.

  Very quietly, Joy said, “I don’t think I’m up to being left behind yet.”

  I gave her hand a squeeze. “It won’t be so bad, now that you know what’s coming. We’ll go along and see what’s got Uncle Parthet smirking so, then we’ll come back. Pretty soon you won’t think any more about using the magic doors than you would about an elevator.”

  “I’m
not sure about that. This is too much like ‘Beam me up, Scotty.’”

  I laughed and we got up from the table. “I never even thought of that,” I said.

  “Must be a flaw in your education.”

  “Did you get enough to eat?” I asked, glancing sideways so I’d be sure to catch her reaction as we followed Parthet to the stairs.

  “I’ve never eaten so much in my life,” Joy said. “It was as if I was starving to death. I hope you weren’t lying about not gaining any weight.”

  I chuckled. “I’ve been eating like that for more than three years and I weigh exactly what I did before I came here.”

  We stopped for my swords before we popped through to Basil. The swords bothered Joy until I explained. “It’s a formality. Tradition says that the Hero of Varay must be armed at all times in public.” That worked until I strapped on both of the claymores, one sword diagonally over each shoulder. Then I had to explain the superstition that an abandoned elf sword would work to a person’s disadvantage. That’s the word I used. Joy nodded, but she was obviously unsatisfied with my explanation. I didn’t strap on my regular broadsword, the blade I had practiced with as a teenager, the one I had used until I “inherited” my first long elf sword, Dragon’s Death. My belt only held my dagger, and Joy didn’t say anything about that. Since we were just going to Castle Basil, there was no need to carry anything else in the way of weapons, no bow and quiver of arrows, for instance, and I didn’t bother to put on armor.

  The doorway leading to my bathroom in Cayenne opens into my bedroom at Castle Basil.

  “I see you’ve got yourself a real setup here,” Joy whispered to me after we went through. “You can hop from bed to bed without even putting your pants back on.”

  “The only bed I’m interested in is the one you’re in,” I whispered back. It’s nice to find the right thing to say once in a while—especially when it’s the truth.

  There was a crowd in the great hall of Castle Basil, but more organized than usual. As we crossed the room from the doorway, it looked as if everyone but the king was present. The focus of all the attention was the head of the lower table. The crowd was so thick that I couldn’t see who, or what, they were all staring at.

  As we crossed the room, Parthet whistled shrilly to get folks’ attention. A few looked, then a few more. They saw Parthet. They saw me. There was some whispering. Most Varayans were more impressed with a Hero of Varay than I was. Half the time I still had to check to make sure that people weren’t staring at me because my fly was open. A path opened in the crowd. People backed off to make room for us.

  And I got my first glimpse of Aaron.

  He was eating, but someone tapped him on the shoulder, then pointed when he looked up. Aaron looked our way, then stood up.

  Aaron was black, extremely dark-skinned. I had known only one black guy that dark before, and he used to brag about it. “Ain’t no honky skeletons in my family closet.” He never sounded convincing when he tried to talk like that. An honors student at Northwestern, from a well-to-do family. Barry had never had much contact with what one of our English professors called Standard Black American English.

  Aaron was thin, with close-cropped hair, dressed in blue jeans, print shirt, and Adidas sneakers. All of his clothing looked new. The jeans were rolled up into exaggerated cuffs.

  Parthet moved a little ahead of Joy and me.

  “Aaron, this is Gil Tyner,” Parthet said.

  Aaron looked up at me without blinking. “You the Man?” he asked. Aaron didn’t sound comfortable talking like that either.

  I smiled. “I studied computer science at Northwestern University, Aaron,” I said. “And this is Joy Bennett. She just graduated from Northwestern.”

  “I know where that is,” Aaron said. “I’m from Joliet.”

  “How old are you, Aaron?” I asked.

  “Eight, almost nine.”

  “What’s your full name?”

  “Aaron Wesley Carpenter. I’m supposed to start fourth grade this year.”

  It was easy to see that Aaron was scared, but he was trying to hide it. At least he didn’t seem to be as panic-stricken as Joy had been. Maybe being a kid has some real advantages.

  “You get enough to eat?” I asked.

  “I never get enough to eat,” Aaron said, very earnestly. It got a laugh. Apparently, his appetite had drawn comment back home.

  “Well, why don’t you sit back down and keep eating. We can talk while you eat, if you don’t mind.”

  “You gonna tell me how to get home? My gramma’s gonna be worried.”

  Aaron and I sat down. Joy stood right behind me, her hands on my back—although she almost got tangled up in my swords first. Aaron looked at the sword hilts sticking up over my shoulders.

  “Are those real?” he asked, pointing with a chunk of bread.

  “The swords?” I asked. He nodded, then I did. “They’re real.”

  Aaron looked around at all the people who were still staring at him. Now that he was at least a little less hungry than before, the crowd was beginning to bother him. I could understand that. I’m not at all that fond of crowds myself.

  “Uncle, can you …” I gestured around. Parthet caught my meaning and, with Baron Kardeen’s help, shooed off most of the gawkers.

  “You want to tell me what happened to you, Aaron?” I asked after we had some clear space around us. Joy sat at my other side after the guards who had been there slid down the bench with their mugs of beer.

  “Don’t know what happened,” Aaron said.

  “Just tell me what you remember.”

  “He-Man was on TV. Gramma lets me watch that.”

  “Don’t your parents let you watch it?”

  He shrugged. “They both work.”

  “Okay, go on, Aaron,” I urged. “What happened? You were watching He-Man.”

  “News came on, right in the middle. The man said a ship got blowed up. Gramma screamed and started crying. I got scared and something went poof, and I wasn’t there no more.”

  “Why did your grandmother scream?” I asked, even though I could make a decent guess at the answer without much trouble.

  “Mom and Dad went on the boat.” He stopped eating then and started crying. Tears ran down his face. He didn’t sob or make any noise. The tears just flowed.

  “He appeared in the town,” Parthet said softly, behind Joy and me. “I mean that just the way it sounds. He just popped up suddenly, out in front of the Bald Rock. There were several witnesses. The boy was scared and the townspeople brought him straight up here. I’ve never heard of anything like this happening before.”

  “You heard about the Coral Lady, I take it,” I said, very softly, turning away from Aaron.

  Parthet nodded. “We heard. That’s why we all came back here so fast. Your mother wanted to wait until we could make sure that you had made it through, but I, uh, overruled her.”

  I couldn’t hold back a smile. That was a scene I would have liked to see. Even Dad had trouble overruling Mother on anything, and Parthet wasn’t a particularly assertive sort.

  “I made a quick jump to Louisville to check on you after I found the swords on my bed,” I said.

  “You wear them well.”

  “Yeah, well, I’d better not come up with any more of these things. I feel like a complete jackass wearing two of them.”

  “Just think of the legends you’re spawning,” Parthet said, chuckling broadly. “It’s something rare for a mortal to be able to claim even one elf sword. You’ve got two of them.”

  “Until Xayber sends another hotshot after me, maybe two or three of them together next time.”

  All this time, Aaron Carpenter sat at the table crying silently. He wasn’t paying any visible attention to us, but I tried to keep an eye on him. When he started wiping at his eyes with his sleeves, I turned back to face him head on.

  “Your parents were on vacation?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “They’re doctors.”r />
  That stopped me flat for a minute. “They had a meeting on the boat?” I asked finally. It was the only thing I could think of. Aaron nodded.

  “You were staying at your grandmother’s house when you went poof?” I asked, and Aaron nodded again. I asked him for the address and he rattled it right off without any hesitation or doubt.

  “You gonna take me home?” Aaron asked.

  My automatic affirmative was stopped when Parthet jabbed me in the shoulder. I turned to look at him and he shook his head vigorously.

  “Hang on a minute, Aaron,” I said. “I’ll be right back.” I got up and went off with Parthet, pulling him along by the sleeve of his Louisville Cardinals sweatshirt. Joy slid along the bench to where I had been sitting and started talking to Aaron.

  “What the hell’s got into you?” I asked Parthet when we were far enough away that Aaron wouldn’t hear us.

  “You can’t take him home,” Parthet said.

  “Why not? His grandmother is probably going crazy if she saw him disappear like that. Even if she didn’t actually see it.”

  “His parents are dead. They were on the Coral Lady.”

  “I figured that out. What difference does it make? He’s still got family.”

  “You’re going to find a way to convince his grandmother that she isn’t crazy?”

  “It can be done,” I said. “Just what’s got into you?”

  Parthet hesitated a beat before he answered. “You remember that I told you that I would know when it was time for me to start training an apprentice? Well, it’s time. Nothing like this has ever happened. It’s the clearest message I could have. Aaron is here to be my apprentice.”

  “He’s just a kid!”

  “That’s the best time to start training him. The only time, as a matter of fact.”