Dominion

by Fred Saberhagen

  `“Ah.”

  `A second glass of wine replaced the first, which had been drained. And now sandwiches were being carried to the table too.

  “Won’t you eat something?”

  On close inspection the plastic points turned out not to be honest simple toothpicks at all, but pink miniature swords. One of them had been skewering an olive in the black man’s drink. Good God. Feathers stared helpless, hypnotized. His host had eaten the olive and was holding the pink sword right against the clear liquid in the glass, sparking an explosion in Feathers’ brain of ancient memories…

  … and present knock-out drops …

  Oh God no. His reaching fingers could no longer find the wine.

  FIVE

  It was about three on a hot Friday afternoon when Simon Hill and Margie Hilbert arrived in Frenchman’s Bend in Simon’s five-year-old car. For Simon, the drive out from Chicago had also been a trip back into memory, back into time. It had been enjoyable in spots, but mainly—he wasn’t sure why—it had been disturbing.

  “Frenchman’s Bend,” he said now, slowing in anticipation on the two-lane concrete highway, almost roofed by the arches of overhanging trees. “I bet they still don’t even have a population figure on the sign.”

  Margie in the right front seat was looking past Simon and across the broad expanse of the Sauk, which was high for summer. She had been quietly admiring the scenery since they had crossed the river at Blackhawk, now almost twenty miles upstream behind them. “Si, you say you know these people who own this place we’re going to? ”

  “Yeah. Sort of. Actually we’re distant cousins. We’ve been out of touch.”

  “Not only that, you don’t like them, do you?”

  He grunted.

  “I get the impression that you’re even out to get back at them for something.”

  Simon didn’t answer.

  “It’s just that if I’m going to wind up in the middle of something, I’d like to know what’s going on. We’re supposed to spend a whole weekend there.”

  “I guess I wouldn’t count on doing that.” He kept expecting to see the recognizably final bend in the highway, and it kept being just a little farther on than he had thought. Now he glanced at Margie, who was still waiting for a real answer, and had to admit that she had a point. The trouble was, he didn’t know what answer would be the truth. “Well,” he said, “it’s a long story. Would you believe, I won’t know how I feel about these people until I see them again? Right now the feelings are not too good. But… ”

  “You were just a kid when you saw them last, huh? What kind of a fight did you have? Was it one of these family things about money?”

  “No. My branch of the family was never in line for any of that anyway.” He drove for a little while in silence. “I was fifteen years old. Saul was maybe twelve. Vivian was about a year older than me, I guess. I had my first affair with her. She’s the Miss Littlewood that old Gregory mentioned. Actually…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Actually I’m not sure what role old Gregory played. I have some confused memories about him.” He glanced at Marge; she wasn’t understanding this; well, that was the point, he had never been able to sort it out himself.

  Margie, practical as usual, was thinking ahead to other matters. “You think the old guy was just conning us about there being entertainment people in the group for the weekend?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  The last bend before Frenchman’s was here at last. The highway curved sharply, under graceful arches of tree limbs. On the right a hill rose up, too steep for farming or even grazing, heavily wooded; on the left, a gently sloping bank only a few yards wide fell to the broad surface of the Sauk. This part of the highway was threatened with flooding fairly often in the spring. Just ahead, the bank going down to the river widened somewhat, and a few old buildings came into view, still half concealed by the summer growth that lined both sides of the highway.

  “This is it,” said Simon. “I was wrong about the population sign. They don’t even have one any more.” There was, at the moment, no other traffic in sight to worry about. He pulled left across the single oncoming lane and onto a clay-and-gravel shoulder that blended into a broad stub of road or driveway serving the three or four buildings that made up this side of the hamlet. A couple of other cars, unfamiliar to Simon, were parked here; no people were in sight. He braked to a gentle halt in the shade of a huge old elm, familiar once he saw it again, but till this moment forgotten. The elm was the biggest healthy specimen he could remember seeing anywhere, having somehow survived the Dutch disease that had all but exterminated its species in these parts a few decades back.

  Like all the towns along this part of the river, Frenchman’s Bend straddled the highway. Four buildings, including sheds, on the side toward the river, maybe twice that many on the other. In his first look around at the place, Simon could not see that anything at all had changed in fifteen years.

  He got out of the car, listening to cicadas drone, looking around some more. The stub of road that he had parked on continued to the edge of the low bluff on which the houses stood, then plunged down through a broad cut in the bluff to the shoreline just a few feet below. The bluffs along this side of the river were considerably lower than those lining the opposite bank, several hundred yards away. Over there the land rose abruptly from the shoreline well over a hundred feet, a height exaggerated by the tallness of the trees atop the bluffs; all that could be seen of the far shore was a continuous soft leafy mass.

  In Frenchman’s Bend the old frame houses stood as Simon remembered them. Whether it was the same paint covering them now or not, it looked no older than the paint of fifteen years ago. The two parked cars were unfamiliar, though; even here some things had to change.

  With Margie following him silently, Simon turned his back on the houses for a moment and walked to the place where the road cut through the bluff. He stood there looking down. On the gravel shingle just below was an abandoned pile of clamshells, left over from the decades before plastic buttons, when the freshwater shells had had some commercial value. Simon remembered the shell pile as soon as he saw it again, as with the giant elm.

  No one around here built a permanent boatdock; the spring ice-jams and floods tended to be too fierce, tearing away anything weaker than a bridge abutment. But there was an old rowboat, too lacking in distinction for Simon’s memory to feel sure about it, tied by padlocked chain to the narrow strip of sand that at the water’s very edge blended into rich mud, an aluminum canoe, unlocked, had been inverted, with a wooden paddle partially visible underneath it. IOf this was the same canoe that he remembered—

  Motion and whiteness, along the wooded shore of an island a hundred yards out in the stream, caught Simon’s eye. He looked up sharply.

  Margie, who had been gazing out across the water in a different direction, turned toward him. “What is it?”

  “I thought I saw … someone out on the island.” The impression, momentary but convincing, had been of pale flesh, completely unclothed, and dark curly hair. Of course what was much more likely was that he had seen someone wearing some light-colored summer garment.

  At the distance, he reflected as he watched the island, it would be hard for even the steadiest gaze to perceive curliness.

  An insect droned from across the water. “Looks like a real jungle over there,” said Margie without much interest.

  Was his imagination continuing to add details, or had he really seen the figure, in that one doubtful moment, as beckoning to him with one arm. He closed his eyes. An inner voice said that, even if he couldn’t remember it, there was good reason why he hadn’t come back here for fifteen years.

  Simon opened his eyes again before Margie could take notice. Now on a sudden impulse he climbed a few steps, from the road to the lip of the bluff. From here he stared downstream, between islands, along the longest visible reach of the river. He knew where the castle stood, half a mile downstream,
atop the high bluff opposite. Simon knew the exact direction in which to look, or thought he did, because he had seen it often enough from this very spot in winter, its gray stone angles standing out starkly amid a tracery of black branches, against gray winter sky…

  A crow, cawing sharply as if disturbed by someone nearby, came up from amid the trees of the nearest island, the one where Simon thought that he had seen the figure. Well then, there was someone on the island, and what of it? But he felt relieved.

  “I’ve never been in a canoe,” said Margie, looking down toward the shingle. “Is that how we’re going to get across?”

  “We’ll see,” Simon told her. “Look, we’ll just check it out as far as we can go, the secret passage and the rest. When we hit a snag that could stop us we’ll give up the idea and come back here and drive back to Blackhawk and around and drive up to the castle by the front door like they’re expecting us to do, and put on our alternate act. But the secret passage just makes too beautiful an opportunity to resist, if it’s still there and we can use it. Right?”

  Margie had been doubtful all along. “The people who own the place now don’t know this passageway is there?”

  “I tell you I don’t think they do. And it can’t hurt anything to try.” Simon resolutely turned his back on the water.

  There were two houses on this side of the highway, along with a couple of outbuildings. In front of the bigger house a wooden sign said BOATS. The ANTIQUES sign Simon also remembered had disappeared sometime in the last decade and a half; he thought he could make out from here the slightly discolored spot on a tree trunk where it had been nailed.

  “Canoes are all right,” he said to Margie now. “You can tip them if you try, or if you jump around wildly in one, but you’re all right if you just sit still. I can do the paddling.” As he spoke he had started walking toward the larger house, with Margie keeping at his side. Now he could see that the name on the rural mailbox a few yards from the house still said Colline. And when he squinted through the heat-shimmer of the concrete to the far side of the highway, it seemed to Simon that he could still make out faded letters on one of the mailboxes over there:Wedderburn. That house on the far side stood next to a building that had once been a farm equipment store, though even in Simon’s earliest childhood memories it had been generations out of date and closed. If Gregory should appear in one of those doorways or windows now, would Simon, seen once more in a familiar context, be recognized?

  But no one at all appeared. Simon led Margie on, toward the house-antique shop. Their feet made a sound that evoked memories for him, crunching lightly on an ancient detritus of broken clamshells, waste from the clam-fishing decades, pulverized by time and by now almost turned to soil.

  A few steps from the closed front door of the house, he halted Margie for a moment. “My aunt and uncle used to run this place as an antique shop. For all I know they still do. I don’t know whether they’ll recognize me or not. If they don’t, I’d just as soon leave it at that.”

  Margie frowned at him—she liked to think sometimes that she was softhearted on family relationships—then shrugged, pretty shoulders moving in the light, longsleeved shirt. “Whatever you say. It’s your town and your family, and you’re the boss on the job.”

  Simon felt like kissing her, and knew she would resent it at this moment. Without giving himself time to think about it any more, he turned to the old familar door and pulled it open. A moment later they were both stepping into the half-familiar semigloom of what had been—no, apparently still was—the antique shop’s main room. The place was crowded with dusty shapes that on a second glance turned out to be not junk for sale but only cases and mountings for displays. There was less actual merchandise on view than he remembered, but there was still some. Business appeared to be languishing even more now than it had been then, which he supposed was hardly surprising given the current absence of a sign out front.

  The antique bell that he remembered had tinkled when they came in. Now Simon watched the curtained doorway that led to the living quarters in back. He was bracing himself for the sight of his aunt or uncle. The curtain stirred as he watched it, and in the fraction of a second before it was whipped aside he knew that if his relatives didn’t recognize him he wasn’t going to tell them who he was, either before or after the performance.

  Except, of course, just possibly—Vivian. Had Miss Littlewood recognized Simon the Great when she saw him in performance, and had she sent Gregory with an invitation for that reason? Since the night in the chapel at TMU, Simon had tried a thousand times to picture what Vivian must be like now, at thirty. He had tried to analyze what he thought about her now, what his feelings were at the prospect of shortly seeing her again. The analysis had proved impossible. The thoughts and feelings would not fall into any ordinary category, except the inadequate one of curiosity.

  And now the curtain was moved aside, and the world, as it often did, surprised Simon. The teenaged girl who emerged into the shop was a stranger to Simon’s memory, looking like no one in particular that he remembered from Frenchman’s Bend, looking as commonplace as any kid he’d seen on the way out from Chicago. The girl had dark hair, but there ended the resemblance to Vivian or to any half-glimpsed water nymphs. Here instead we had a moderately dumpy, banally adolescent figure in denim shorts and loosely swaddling haltertop.

  “Can I help you?” the girl asked, in a voice as reassuringly ordinary as the rest of her. She had put her hands on the counter near the kerosene lamp. Whether that particular lamp had been in stock fifteen years ago Simon had no way of telling. There was fluid in its glass reservoir, and the wick was charred. The house had electricity, of course, but that lamp had been used recently.

  Simon smiled confidently. “I see you have a canoe down there. I’d like to rent it for a couple of hours.”

  “No,” said the girl, shaking her head. It was a surprisingly quick, definite answer, as if such requests came frequently and she had been trained how to respond to them. But then she added unexpectedly: “If you want to go over to the castle, my brother can paddle you over.”

  Simon blinked deliberately. “I didn’t say anything about a castle. You mean the huge house on the other side of the river?”

  The girl surveyed them calmly. “You don’t look like you’re going fishing, or on a picnic.” Simon exchanged glances with Marge; they were both dressed casually, in practical jeans and long-sleeved shirts against expected mosquitoes. Marge had on light white gym shoes, Simon brown suede loafers. But they weren’t dressed for fishing, and apart from Margie’s large shoulder bag they were carrying nothing.

  Tuning up his smile to about its second most charming level, Simon told the girl: “We’re not waterskiing, either. All right, then, we’ll hire the canoe and your brother too for a couple of hours. Does he have a regular rate?”

  “Talk to him,” the girl advised. “I’ll go get him.” She came out from behind the counter and scuffed on bare feet toward a side door.

  In the dim light Simon looked around at tawdry, scanty merchandise, at junk, at dust. Marge’s eyes were alert and expectant but he had nothing to communicate to her at the moment. Listening carefully he could hear the girl’s quiet voice drifting in faintly from beyond the side door where she had gone out. He couldn’t hear what she was saying. There was a private yard out there, on the side of the house away from the highway, or at least there had been one when Simon lived here.

  Shortly the girl came back into the shop, followed a moment later by a boy who in apparent age, about fifteen, might have been her twin, but who otherwise resembled her only vaguely. He was tightening the fancy belt buckle on his jeans; his lean chest showed under an unbuttoned gray shirt, and his feet were shoeless like his sister’s.

  Simon asked him: “Five bucks an hour okay?”

  “Yeah. Fine.” The youth sounded moderately eager.

  “Our car’s not going to be in your way out here, is it?”

  The girl assured them: “Nobod
y’ll bother it.”

  Then Simon and Margie followed her untalkative brother out through the side door, past a couple of lawn chairs in the yard, and down a narrow path toward the water. The river, Simon thought to himself again, was quite high for midsummer; the lands to the north and east, along the upper Sauk and its tributaries in far northern Illinois and Wisconsin, must have been getting heavy rains lately. And he could see rainclouds now, in the southwest sky, beyond the wooded bluff where the hidden castle waited. When you lived in the city steadily, he thought, you lost touch with the weather, caring only how cold it was at the moment, whether you might be going to get wet. Anyway he estimated that the next rain here was still hours away; it shouldn’t interfere with what he and Marge were going to try to do.

  Simon helped the boy turn over the canoe and get it into the water. Marge, following directions and making no fuss about possible tipping, got in without incident. Simon loaded his own considerably greater weight in near the middle of the craft; and then their barefoot guide shoved off and hopped in skillfully behind him.

  Their guide’s presence restricted conversation somewhat. Simon had planned to use this portion of the trip for briefing Margie further on history and local conditions, but he would be able to do that later when they were alone. He sat in the canoe and looked around and thought.

  So far, the view from the water only reinforced his general impression that nothing much had changed, except for people. He wondered without concern where his aunt and uncle were. Surely, if they had sold out or otherwise departed permanently, the name on the mailbox would have been changed by the new occupants. Of course the boy and girl might easily belong to some branch of the family. They would hardly have been born fifteen years ago, and Simon hadn’t kept up with any family events. He wondered idly if perhaps they were really twins; that would be consistent with their being relatives. It seemed that multiple births were more common in the complex of locally interrelated families than they were in the general population.