But that would mean that Marta, and Ivar del Hival, and every person in Tir Na Nog that he knew would be long dead of old age, even Arnie. Freya would still be the same—which was good and reassuring, and so would Harbard, which wasn’t—but…
Shit. Now he knew how Rip van Winkle felt. Or how Peter Pan ought to have felt.
The toe of his boot brushed against something. He looked down, and dropped to one knee.
It was a piece of plastic, poking up through the soft ground, thin brown plastic like the tube that the peanut butter in his rucksack came in. He stooped and pulled it out of the ground; it came easily. That was exactly what it was: an empty peanut butter tube—he could even read the black letters against the dark brown plastic.
They had buried their trash when they had last camped out here, but while plastic wasn’t biodegradable, it wouldn’t look so new after dozens of years.
And that was good. Ian hadn’t realized that he had been holding his breath, but now it all came out in a heavy sigh. It was going to be okay: It hadn’t been years. Marta wasn’t a great-grandmother, and he was still Ian Silverstein, not Rip van Winkle, and not Peter Pan.
The sun had set while he was climbing the hill. It was time to get ready to settle in for the night.
The perversity of the universe, Ian had long ago decided, tends toward the maximum.
There were times when you just couldn’t win: Ian had decided to spend the night on Bóinn’s Hill because he was sure he would sleep well there, and now Ian couldn’t sleep at all.
There was every reason that he should be able to. Bóinn’s Hill felt safe and friendly. Insects chirped and clicked off in the night; it wasn’t the too-quiet that would make the hairs on the back of his head twitch.
His blankets were warm without being too warm, and he had always slept best when he was warm but the room was cold. He had cut some of the long grasses that grew down-slope and laid them under his groundpad, and the pad itself was good enough insulation to keep the ground from sucking the heat out of his body.
Even the ground beneath him seemed to support him without being too hard—like a good futon. He had eaten well—Karin Thorsen had filled the bottom of his rucksack with freeze-dried camping meals, and a little hot water added to a packet of peppery beef stew would have been a good meal back home, not to mention here.
Giantkiller was close to his hand, and the broad trunk of the old (new?) oak tree sheltered him from the discomfort of a cold gust of wind. The clothes he had been wearing hung from a branch, airing out overnight.
The night breeze brought him warm woodsy smells, leavened with a minty note of evergreens.
And he was tired. Walking through the Hidden Ways hadn’t tired him, although in a strange way it had taken something out of him. But making his way through the forest and up the trail had left him bone-weary, the way a full day’s march always had—and presumably always would—ever since his brief tenure as a Boy Scout.
But insomnia was something Ian had always thought of as a luxury. Sort of like indigestion. When you had to use every moment of the day for studying, practice, or work, you couldn’t spend a lot of time eating, and while you had to rest, lying awake at night in bed was something that you just couldn’t afford.
There was a full complement of drugs in his kit—Doc Sherve never had a problem writing a prescription for somebody’s first aid kit, for he felt that when you needed, say, Demerol and Vistaril, what you should have was Demerol and Vistaril, and if you didn’t understand the difference between great pain and recreation, Doc would be happy to explain it to you in excruciating detail, with short, Anglo-Saxon words.
So he could pop a Valium.
Right. And then he could wash it down with a few snorts of whatever that orange-chocolate booze was. And then maybe he could skip going to Falias to try to get the Sons off the trail of Thorsen blood and settle down, say, with Marta, have kids, and by the time she died perhaps he could get drunk every day and then slap the kids around some.
His father’s footsteps were, after all, always available for the walking-in.
Maybe he was just being silly, he thought, as he lay back, pillowing the back of his head on his hands. Bending a little made sense. He didn’t have to always be such a goddamn hardass.
“Sure.” Ian laughed out loud. “Yeah, right.”
Well, yes, he did always have to be such a hardass. If he couldn’t sleep without drugging himself, then fuck it: he wouldn’t sleep. His aching legs could drag him through another day’s march if he had to, and then—
This time it would be better.
Ian lay back on the creaky old bed, pillowing his head on his hands. Dad and The New Girlfriend were due home from the party any time now. TNG would take her pills and go straight to bed—this one went through tranks the way Ian went through Tic-Tacs—but Dad would head for the liquor shelf for his nightcap.
This time, he would smile.
Ian had a surprise ready for him. It wasn’t quite perfect—he thought he had earned an A in Biology, but Mr. Fusco hadn’t seen it that way. Not enough class participation, he’d said, and then there was the occasional absence—fencing meets weren’t scheduled during school hours, but Ian needed extra practice when an important tournament was coming up—and a few latenesses. Biology came right after gym on Tuesday and Thursday, and gym was Ian’s time to shake a few things loose, whether it was faking Bobby Adajian out of his shorts in football, or going for a jump shot with great enthusiasm and absolutely no skill during the quarter that basketball was the gym teacher’s sport of choice, because if he showed enough enthusiasm, and did at least passably well, Mr. Daniels would bring out his foils and masks and give Ian a quickie lesson while the rest of the class was taking their final laps. Mr. Daniels had, in his younger days, tried out for the Olympic team, and he had a deceptively defensive style that Ian was trying to pick up. Milking that lesson for every minute meant having to rush through a quick shower, and that usually meant being late, but that was no big deal. Or at least it shouldn’t have been. Shit, Mr. Fusco usually spent the first ten minutes of every class flirting with the senior girls.
It was a good report card. Except for the one B+, it was straight As. Even in driver’s ed, although that technically didn’t count
For once he had a report card to brag about, instead of one to try to hide.
He would, as usual, pretend to be asleep, and if he didn’t hear raised voices, he would pretend to be woken up by their coming home, and would stagger, sleepy-eyed up the stairs, from his basement bedroom after Dad had had a chance to notice. Oh, Dad would probably make some sort of comment about the one B+, but even he would have to admit that this was as near-perfect a report card as an imperfect person could be expected to have.
Ian heard the car door slam outside, and then the garage door go up—you’d think that somebody with a bad back like Dad would have bought one of those garage door openers—and then the muffled roar of the big V-8 engine pulling the Pontiac into the garage, and the dieseling chk-chk-chk-chk as it refused, for just a moment, to shut down, and then the thunk-thunk of the car doors, followed by the footsteps, the opening and closing of the door, and their footsteps and quiet voices out in the laundry room as they came into the house.
Ian let out a long breath. They were talking, and quietly. That was good. He didn’t even have to pretend to be asleep, although from long habit he forced himself to breathe slowly and regularly when the door to his room was swung open.
“He’s asleep,” TNG’s husky voice said. Her cigarette lighter hissed briefly.
“Good. Room doesn’t look too bad, either. Bet you he didn’t do the dishes, though.”
I did so, Ian didn’t say. Well, dish, really.
You didn’t need more than a frying pan to make fried rice of the leftovers.
And if you didn’t actually use a dish, then you couldn’t have loaded it into the dishwasher incorrectly, and if you didn’t load it into the dishwasher incorrectly, you weren�
��t to blame if—make that when—the dishwasher wasn’t loaded correctly.
The idea was to keep as low a profile as possible; what didn’t show wasn’t something you could get in trouble for. Ian had never understood that old question about the tree falling in the forest. If there was nobody around to see it, and if you had a good enough alibi, then it didn’t matter.
If he just moved quickly enough, if he just hydroplaned across the surface of Dad’s life, then he wouldn’t sink and drown.
He was congratulating himself, and just getting to stretch and get ready to go upstairs when he heard Dad’s feet pounding on the stairs.
The door swung open quickly. Dad stood there, framed in the doorway, the light from the hall making him only a silhouette. Ian’s dreams were ruthlessly honest, and he found himself wondering, once more, why it should be that a little man no taller than five foot seven could loom so large in a doorway.
But this time it would be okay.
“Nice try.” That wasn’t right. Dad’s voice was calm and level, the way it was when he was so angry that he could barely restrain himself, and wasn’t going to restrain himself much longer. It was the voice that he used when Ian had really screwed up, yet again, and the shit was about to hit the fan.
“But, Dad—”
“ ‘But Dad’, butdad, butdad, butdad,” he said in that mocking tone that made it seem like Ian had sounded like Porky Pig, “haven’t I told you a thousand times I hate butdads?”
“But, I mean, well,” he said, panicking. “One B+? That’s near perfect.”
Dad snorted. “Yeah, it sure is. I bet you thought that when you folded the report card over and taped it to the cabinet, I wouldn’t notice that you’ve got five absences and seven tardies this quarter. Been ditching school to go play with your little sword again, eh? That Robin Hood shit isn’t any reason to skip school, and sneaking away to do it without asking me pisses me off more. Why didn’t you ask me?”
There was no right answer to that. Because if I asked, you would say no was the truth, but telling Dad the truth about this, here and now, would be talking back.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“None of that shit. Tell me why, now!”
“Really, I don’t know.”
“You think if you keep saying ‘butdad’ and ‘I don’t know’ that’ll make it okay? If you gave a good goddamn about me and about yourself, you’d put first things first and leave your little Robin Hood games for your free time. Pisses me off…” He took a step forward, and—
“This should be a place for more gentle dreams, Ian Silver Stone,” a familiar voice spoke out of the soft, warm darkness.
Ian rose quickly, his blankets tossed aside, Giantkiller naked in his hand.
“Oh, Ian Silver Stone, do not worry. Your instincts have, this time, served you well: you’ve chosen a fine place to sleep.”
The voice was high and clear, a flute rather than a clarinet.
He lowered the point of his sword, and the air in front of him gained light and substance, until Bóinn hovered about the grasses in front of him.
Her mouth was small and perfect, her chin dainty and pointed. She had one of those faces that had no apparent age; she could have been twenty or forty, although he knew she was much, much older. The left side of her face was lit brightly by the starlight that somehow left the right side of her face in such utter darkness that he couldn’t make out even its coarsest features.
You couldn’t see colors in this kind of darkness. It was a physical impossibility: there just wasn’t enough light to power the cone cells. But Bóinn’s hair was the red of fresh blood, curled tightly against her head, and when she smiled at him, her freckled cheeks were dimpled.
Her body was slim but decidedly curved, more covered than hidden with the woven clouds that constituted her shift; her right nipple, set high on her small breast, kept peeking through. She was a full head shorter than Ian, but her eyes were level with his: she floated en pointe, her perfect toes never quite touching the grasses above which she floated.
He had the strong impression that if one of her toes so much as touched a blade of grass, she would vanish, she would pop like a soap bubble.
“But in a dream you can,” she said. The movements of her mouth were slightly out of sync with her words, like a movie where one language had been dubbed in over another, but not well enough.
“Eh?”
“You can see colors in the dark in a dream. That’s how you know my hair is red, the red of fresh blood.” Her smile widened for just a moment. “You’re not the first person to think that, you know.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Well, now you do.” She rotated, slowly, until she was facing the oak, and her dark side was completely hidden from him. “Yes, this is but a dream. It’s just about all I can do, these days, to take form and substance in a dream. Oh, perhaps I can whisper on the wind, or send a shiver up a spine during the daytime, but it tires me to try.”
“You’re looking well, for such an old woman, Bóinn,” he said, realizing the moment the words were out of his mouth that that could have been taken the wrong way.
Her quiet laugh told him that he hadn’t offended. “I thank you for the tree,” she said. “It’s been a comfort to me.”
“It’s huge,” he said. It had only been a few months. It should be no more than a sprout, or a mini-sapling, or whatever you called a baby tree.
She laughed, silver bells in the wind. “There are reasons why people fear my hill, and leave it and me alone. Someone who slept here against my wishes would fall asleep as easily as you did, but might not sleep quite as well.” Her lips parted, revealing bone-white teeth, and for a moment, her smile was skeletal and menacing. But the moment was quickly gone. “I didn’t enter your dream until it turned on you—but you’re welcome here, after all.”
“I know. The dwarf I’m traveling with—he didn’t want to sleep anywhere near here.”
“A friend of yours is, of course, welcome on my hill.” Her mouth twitched.
“After all this time, I find my feelings can be hurt.”
“You always were of a delicate temperament, Bóinn,” came from behind Ian.
He spun about. Standing behind him, his skinny frame wrapped in a traveling cloak, Hosea stood leaning on his staff.
“There are some who would argue with that,” Bóinn said, her voice casual, but perhaps concealing some heat.
“But none who know you quite as well as I do, perhaps,” Hosea said. He turned to Ian. “It’s good to see you, Ian. I hope you don’t mind.”
Ian chuckled. “Hey, you’re welcome in any dream of mine, as long as you’ve brought some coffee. With all the rush, I forgot to pack some.”
Hosea nodded, producing a thermos from his pack. “I wish you’d mentioned that in Hardwood. I would have brought more than just ten pounds, which I thought would find their way to Arnie Selmo, sooner or later.” He unscrewed the top and poured Ian a steaming cup of coffee, which Ian accepted gratefully.
Why was dream coffee always hotter than real coffee could be without scalding?
“Because it is a dream, Ian,” Bóinn said.
His left shoulder twitched with pain. Not nearly as bad as it had been, but he hoped it would be better than this when he woke. Good coffee was nice, but no pain would be nicer.
Bóinn was at his shoulder.
“Don’t move,” she said, Her voice a whisper of cold breeze against his cheek, which somehow warmed him thoroughly. Her long, elegant fingers stroked the air around him, never quite touching his shoulder. But they were cold; he could feel them soaking the heat from his body.
“There’s little I can do for you, Ian Silver Stone, but your heart and head have picked a good place to rest for the night.” With a creaking of branches and a rustling of leaves, the old oak reached down and lifted him up, wrapping him tightly in its leafy embrace.
“You should remember to follow both your heart and your head. Not either, but b
oth; together, they may well lead you well. Most of the time. For now, rest.”
Ian started to voice a protest, but the warm darkness swallowed him up.
Ian Silver Stone woke in the early morning light, lying next to the oak tree. He rose and stretched, utterly unsurprised to see Hosea’s form, wrapped in his brown cloak, sleeping just a few feet away.
Ian worked his left shoulder. No pain, no stiffness. If anything, he felt better than he had before. Sleeping under the tree had been, well, restful, the way sleep was always supposed to be and too often wasn’t.
He was ravenously hungry, and while a quick Hershey’s bar from the outer pocket of his rucksack eased the pangs, what he really wanted was hot food.
Last time he was in this part of Vandescard, he had had to keep a low profile. But now, perhaps not. He was, at least technically, engaged to the Margravine of the Eastern Hinterlands, although that probably didn’t amount to much—unless he wanted to actually marry Marta and settle down to be a margrave.
Surely the fiancé of a margravine could light a fire to warm his breakfast On the other hand, the nearest source of wood, other than the oak, was at the bottom of Bóinn’s Hill, and while it had been a surprisingly easy climb up yesterday, Ian didn’t fancy the idea of starting off a daylong march by playing the Noble Duke of York.
Hosea, though, was a thoughtful sort. Perhaps he had gathered some and stashed it in his rucksack as he had walked. The only problem with doing something about that was that he didn’t really want to wake Hosea—if the old man was sleeping, he probably still needed his sleep—and you just didn’t open somebody else’s pack without permission. On the road, be it in the U.S. or in Tir Na Nog, your pack was your home, and what little privacy you had, you deserved.
No big deal. Cold sausage would make an adequate breakfast, and he could drain his canteen now, and refill it later. As long as you weren’t in danger of going a long time without—and this close to the Gilfi, that wasn’t a concern—the best place to carry water was inside you.
The Crimson Sky Page 15