by Kim Fielding
“Um, sure.”
“But now yours has a little bend to it that mine hasn’t, and mine has this nick here. They are the same spoon, shaped by different events.”
He nodded. He wasn’t sure where she was going with this, but he understood so far.
She gave him the exact same smile Mrs. Warner gave him in third grade when he’d finally learned to write his name in legible cursive. “You are a spoon, Mike, and Lord Meliach is another. You were created from identical… well, let’s call them molds. But then you were put in different places. Different worlds.”
He wanted to remove his hood so he could scratch his head but didn’t quite dare. He chewed his lip instead. “So you’re saying… this Meliach guy is me, but in an alternate universe?”
“That’s not quite accurate, but close enough. A human can’t fully comprehend this.”
“Are there infinite other mes in infinite other universes?”
She looked annoyed again. “That doesn’t matter. All that’s important is this world. And your own, of course, if you return.”
If? He didn’t like the sound of that.
But Agata was still speaking. “Lord Meliach offended my sister and refuses to do anything about it. I can’t influence him directly. You know, free will and all of that. But the villagers are suffering, and I can’t have that, can I?”
“I guess not.” For someone who was so concerned about the villagers’ well-being, she’d paid them surprisingly little attention. But he didn’t comment on that.
“There are rules, Mike, rules that even gods must obey lest we have chaos. One rule states that a person must repent and ask forgiveness for his own transgressions. Nobody else can do that for him. But”—she tipped her head slightly and curled her mouth into a small smile—“rules have loopholes. You are such a loophole.”
“Oh. Oh! I can do the repenting thing because I am Meliach, more or less.”
“Exactly! You petition Alina to remove the curse and—if you follow proper form—she must grant your petition.”
Mike took a big swig of wine, draining the cup. He set the goblet firmly back on the table. “Great. So what do I have to do? Say some prayers in that temple in the square? A few Hail Alinas?” He wasn’t Catholic and had only vague notions of what the whole penance gig involved.
“I’m afraid not,” Agata replied. She finished her own wine, then neatly stacked the spoons. She patted her hair as if checking the integrity of her braids. And then she smiled serenely. “To gain my sister’s forgiveness, Mike, you must go on a pilgrimage.”
Chapter 3
FOR A brief moment when Mike awoke, he hoped the dream was over and he was back in his own bed. But even before he opened his eyes, he felt the hard ground beneath him and the scratchy clothes against his skin, and he smelled hay and manure. He pried his eyelids open. The sun was shining through the holes in the roof of an old barn, illuminating the dust motes. He sneezed and sat up with a groan.
His exhaustion and confusion had hit him like a blow shortly after he finished his meal the previous night. Agata had droned on for a while—something about pilgrims—but he hadn’t been able to make sense of her words. She must have realized the futility of the conversation and had led him through the town walls to a farm, where she showed him a decrepit structure that had probably once housed a few farm animals. “You can sleep in there,” she said. “Your journey will begin tomorrow.”
He’d been far too tired to argue, so tired that he’d fallen asleep almost as soon as he lay down in a dark corner. He hadn’t noticed the bumpy earthen floor at all.
But now he was noticing it—his back was sore and his mouth tasted like dirt. He stood up slowly, trying to stretch out a few of the kinks. He vaguely remembered Agata warning him to stay inside the barn, but his bladder was urgently full, so he ended up creeping just outside and pissing against the edge of the little stone building. And as he was tucking himself back inside the trousers with the weird wooden buttons, he found himself facing a cold, hard fact: he was not in the middle of a drug-induced hallucination. He didn’t know much about psychedelics, but he was certain that no trip would last this long, nor would it have such underlying coherence tying together the bizarre bits.
He returned to the barn and sat on an overturned barrow with a missing wheel and broken handle. Okay. If nobody had slipped LSD into his burger, two options remained, and neither of them was attractive. Maybe he’d blown a gasket and was now so droolingly insane that he’d completely lost track of reality. That left his body back in his apartment, now with his liver intact. If he was lucky, someone would check on him soon, and he’d be bundled off to an institution where the doctors would fill his veins with medicines having lots of x’s and z’s in their names and where he might eventually regain himself.
That scenario just didn’t ring true. He’d always been remarkably mentally stable. When he’d realized he was gay, he hadn’t felt especially angsty about it. He’d told his parents, and they’d responded with love and support (and, on his mother’s part, a hope that he’d settle down with a nice boy and adopt children someday). When his father died of cancer, Mike had grieved, but he’d also found comfort in remembering the good times he and Dad had shared. When the love of his life cheated on him and then dumped him, Mike was philosophical: other fish in the sea. College stresses, tough times at work, tight finances—he’d gone through perfectly ordinary hard times and had weathered them all. Everyone called him levelheaded. Friends came to him all the time for advice.
But if he hadn’t had a sudden psychotic break, that meant he’d fallen down the rabbit hole for real. Christ, he didn’t believe in rabbit holes or alternate universes or pissed-off goddesses. A trip to another world wasn’t any less terrifying than the prospect of psychosis, really. At least mental illness could be treated.
“I hope you slept well.”
Mike jumped slightly—he hadn’t noticed Agata entering the barn. She held a piece of bread in one hand and a chunk of something that looked like cheese in the other. “Eat these,” she said. “It’s the last meal I’ll provide for you.”
They were dry, but he ate them dutifully. When he was finished, she made sure his face was covered by the scarf, then led him back to the dirt road. She stopped not too far away, in a spot where the river passed very close. He knelt gratefully on the bank, drinking his fill of the cool water and washing his face, hands, and feet as well as he could.
He stood and squinted at her. “Why me, Agata? Why not one of the other Mikes?”
“I don’t know. I needed one of you, and it was you I found. Fate.”
“I don’t believe in fate.”
She smiled. “That doesn’t matter. Fate believes in you.” She reached up to readjust his face covering, and her expression became serious. “Keep this on until you reach Nenahde. You won’t be recognized once you cross the border.”
“What happens if someone does recognize me?”
“Word will get back to Lord Meliach. He will not be pleased to learn he has a twin traveling the countryside. He’s a stubborn, selfish man, Mike. You don’t want to cross him.”
It sounded as if Mike’s doppelgänger was an asshole, which worried Mike. If they were made from the same mold, did that mean Mike was an asshole too? He didn’t think so. He had friends. He wasn’t a saint by any means, but he didn’t treat people badly. “Okay. I’ll keep the scarf on,” he said.
“Good. And you may have this as well.” She reached into the folds of her skirts and produced a thin book with a red leather cover, which she handed to him.
He looked at it curiously. There were no words on the cover at all, and when he opened it, he realized it had been handwritten in dark-brown ink. The script was ornate and hard to read. “The Traille to the Shrine of the Ladye,” he said doubtfully.
“Yes. It’s an account of the pilgrimage you are undertaking. It’s over three hundred years old, but I daresay things haven’t changed much. The road is the same.” She nodd
ed. “You will use it as a guide. It tells you where you must stop along the way—there are several small shrines as you go—and what to do once you arrive.”
Great. It was an alternative universe Lonely Planet guide. He wondered if it mentioned gay nightclubs along the way. Unlikely. “How am I able to read this? Why are we speaking the same language? Things look pretty different here from back home, and I can’t imagine you’ve had the same unlikely combination of Anglo-Saxons and Romans and French and everyone to create the same English.”
“We call our language Yezzik. It’s not a coincidence that it’s identical to yours. What would I do with an alternate to Lord Meliach with whom I couldn’t communicate?”
The headache was coming back. He decided to let his worries go. No use trying to make sense of things if he was psychotic, and if this was real, well, he had bigger problems than linguistic puzzles.
His stolen vest had deep inside pockets. He slipped the book into one of them. “Okay, fine. What if I refuse to go? I didn’t create the problem.”
“No, you didn’t. If you refuse to go, the people here will continue to suffer. And I will not return you to your home.”
“You’re going to force me? That’s not fair!”
“Nor is it fair that the entire village suffers for one man’s arrogance. It’s a lesson every god knows and every mortal should learn: life is not fair.” She looked slightly smug.
He looked down at his bare feet. They were already filthy, even though he’d just washed them. Then he looked back up at Agata. “If I do this, will you promise to send me home?”
“Mortals make promises to gods, not the other way around.” She tipped her head slightly. “But it is likely.”
That wasn’t altogether encouraging. But maybe if he did this pilgrimage thing and Agata refused to zap him back where he belonged, her sister Alina would. For all he knew, this place was lousy with deities and some of them were willing to strike a deal. For the moment at least, going along with Agata’s plan seemed the best option. Not a good option, just the best of them.
Either her goddess powers told her that Mike had reached a decision or his eyes gave him away, because she smiled broadly. “Leave now,” she said. “You don’t want to waste daylight.”
“Fine. Where are my supplies?”
Her eyebrows rose. “Supplies?”
“Yeah. Shoes, extra clothes, money, um… passport? Whatever I need for the trip.” He didn’t travel all that much usually, and when he did, he always used packing guides.
But Agata was shaking her head. “There are no supplies. A pilgrim takes nothing—that’s an important aspect of the journey. He entrusts himself to fate, to the kindness of others.”
Mike Carlson was not Blanche DuBois. And as he recalled, things hadn’t worked out very well for her. “Nothing?” he asked a little plaintively.
Agata stared at him silently for a few moments. She looked directly into his eyes. He didn’t know what she saw there; in hers he saw hints of sparks, like the aftereffects of gazing at a bright flashing light. Finally, she reached into her skirts again and this time pulled out a small cloth bag. She tossed it to him, and he caught it. It jangled a little. “Just a few coppers,” she said. “They’ll buy you a night or two of lodging in Nenahde, nothing more.”
“Thank you.” He stuffed the purse in his pocket.
She pointed down the road in the opposite direction of the village. “Just follow this. If you hurry, you’ll reach the border before nightfall. The book will direct you from there.”
“No yellow brick road?”
She frowned. “No, just dirt. Cobbles in the larger towns.”
Okay. Alternative world goddesses didn’t get pop-culture references. “I don’t suppose you’ll be coming with?” he asked.
“I told you. I cannot get overly involved. I’ve done too much as it is. But my sister….” She scowled. “Do not tell anyone that I have brought you from another world. I forbid it.”
“Why?”
“Magic like that frightens humans. It makes them wonder too much what else the universe holds for them. And in any case, I don’t wish Alina to realize too soon what I have done.”
“What’s the curse? I mean, I know I haven’t been here long, but I don’t see plagues of frogs or anything.”
Agata looked suddenly furious, which was scary. “She has refused them death.”
“Huh?”
“You—Lord Meliach wanted to make a good showing at the wedding tournament, because he is a vain man. He said prayers to my sister Alina. He promised her a sacrifice if she would bless him. And she did bless him, and he won his competition quite handsomely. But by the time he returned home, he’d convinced himself he’d won through his own great skill alone, and he did not follow through with his promise. And so Alina laid a curse on all his people—none of them can die.”
“That… that doesn’t sound all that awful. Sounds like a good thing.”
“Idiot!” she snapped. “My sister did not grant them eternal health or the miraculous ability to heal terrible injuries. Even if she wanted to, she couldn’t give them those things, because those things are not within her domain. But she denies them death.”
Mike remembered his father, lying still and shrunken in a hospice bed with wires and tubes and beeping monitors everywhere. He remembered how drawn his mother had looked, sitting at the bedside for days and days. And he remembered his father looking at him through filmy eyes that had once been bright and sharp, and Mike had known then that Dad had given up fighting the disease that was eating him from the inside. The morphine was no longer enough. Death had become a release instead of a threat.
“I understand,” Mike said quietly.
“Then go, Michael Albert Carlson. Beg my sister’s forgiveness.”
He went.
MIKE WAS in pretty good shape despite the desk-jockey job. But jogging through his neighborhood in two-hundred-dollar running shoes or hitting the gym before work to lift weights was not the same as walking down a bumpy dirt road with bare feet. His feet started to hurt pretty quickly, and then so did his legs. The homespun clothing was uncomfortable, chafing against his skin. He was happy his briefs protected him, although even they were making him itchy from grime and dried sweat.
He wanted his Honda.
He wanted to go home.
“Where’s the damned ruby slippers when you need them?” he muttered somewhere around midday. The bread and cheese breakfast, hardly filling to begin with, had long since been digested. Which was another issue—no rest stops or Porta-Potties along the route. Just trees. And farms. And a few people, most of whom stared at him distrustfully before looking away. He didn’t blame them. With Agata’s scarf wrapped around his face and his hood pulled up, he looked sinister, like a medieval Unabomber.
At least the roadway followed the river faithfully, which meant he had plenty to drink, and when he needed a rest, he could sit on the bank and dip his feet in the water.
With no company and not much to distract him, he was left with his thoughts. Try as he might, he couldn’t make sense of what had happened to him. He couldn’t come up with a better explanation than insanity or real-life magic. And that made him uncomfortable because either possibility required a major shift in his worldview. He wasn’t good at that sort of thing. When he was a kid, some of his teachers told him he needed to exercise his imagination more freely, but he’d resisted. He was a color-inside-the-lines kind of guy.
When he was a junior in high school, his English teacher made them read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Mike hadn’t enjoyed it. The premise was entirely ridiculous. It had seemed to him at the time that if Twain wanted to point out stereotypes about the age of chivalry, which was what Mike’s teacher claimed, he could have just written a nonfiction book describing the sixth century like it really was. But that would have required research, and novelists were probably too lazy for that. Easier just to make stuff up.
Now, though, Mi
ke found himself a Connecticut Yankee for real—or a California one, anyway. But unlike Twain’s hero, Mike was not an engineer. Sure, he could work frigging magic with an Excel spreadsheet, but that probably wasn’t going to come in handy now.
He missed the Internet.
The shadows began to grow long, and he still hadn’t eaten. He passed lots of growing things, but he wasn’t sure what was edible. Besides, he didn’t want to piss off a farmer. He would have paid a thousand bucks for a decent taco truck.
He didn’t come across many other travelers. Twice men walked in the other direction with carts pulled by donkeys, and once somebody on horseback passed him by. One time he came across a small group of people—a family, by the look of it, with small kids—sitting by the roadside and eating. They didn’t look friendly and didn’t offer him anything, so he kept walking.
But when the sky began to dim, traffic picked up. People were hurrying now, most of them in the same direction he was going. He wondered uneasily if the road became dangerous at night. Bandits, maybe. Or predators of some kind. Wolves? Goddamn dragons, for all he knew. Or hell, he could just stumble over a rock in the darkness and break his neck.
He was considerably relieved when the road rose a little and he saw an actual city ahead of him. It was surrounded by a wall like Lord Meliach’s village, but this city was much larger. And the road seemed to lead straight to an enormous open gate.
By the time he reached the gate, the crowds had become quite thick. People were clearly anxious to get inside, but a trio of men in uniforms was questioning each traveler and taking their sweet time about letting them in. Mike had been to Canada and Mexico a couple of times; it was strangely comforting to discover that border guards here were as officious as they were at home.
The locals weren’t very good at lining up. They clustered close, jostling one another for a spot closer to the entrance. Mike soon realized that the guards weren’t just officious—they were enjoying themselves at the expense of the people trying to enter. A group of people inside the gate were hanging around nearby, laughing, catcalling, and generally having fun with the free entertainment.