The Hero King Page 3

  “Am I holding him?” I asked.

  “Mostly, but he is fighting on his own as well.” Aaron shrugged. “He is aware of what’s going on, I think, and I feel a tremendous sense of duty from him. He’s fighting, but he couldn’t make it for long without you. He seems to be getting impossibly stretched out, the way Wellivazey was near the end.”

  I closed my eyes for a moment when I realized that I could no longer argue the point. Maybe I couldn’t see it on my own, but when Aaron pointed it out to me, I had to accept that he was telling me the truth.

  “Wait here,” I told Aaron when I opened my eyes again. I went back to the bed, sat on the stool, and took Pregel’s hand again. For several minutes, I just sat there with him, knowing what I had to say, but still having trouble bringing myself to say it.

  “I won’t hold you any longer, Grandfather,” I whispered. “I know you’ve done everything you could.”

  I’m not sure exactly what I expected to happen when I said that. I guess I thought that something would happen quickly, like in the movies—you know, a moment of consciousness, a dying message, and then a dramatic end. But nothing at all seemed to change. The king continued his oh-so-shallow breathing. His pulse remained the same. After perhaps another twenty minutes, I heard footsteps behind me. Mother had tired of waiting out in the hall. I’m sure she hadn’t gone any farther away than that … not for more than a couple of minutes at least. I got up and let her sit again.

  “It’s just a matter of time now, I think,” I told her, standing so my back was to the king. “I’ve got to get home for a little while. You’ll send someone for me … if there’s any change?” I didn’t want to spell it out. Mother nodded and kept her face neutral, without expression.

  Aaron and I left the room and headed downstairs with Lesh trailing behind.

  “You’ll have to brief Parthet and Kardeen on everything,” I told Aaron. “Tell them about the Russians up at Arrowroot and ask Kardeen to start figuring out how we’re going to take care of them all until I can get them back to the real world. I’ve got to get home to Joy.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything here,” Aaron said.

  Despite all the weirdness in general conditions and in his own personal, extraordinary experiences, Aaron had a sureness that was uncanny. As short a time as I had known him, and despite the circumstances, I already got the same feeling of reliability from Aaron that I got from Baron Kardeen or—within his expanding limits—Lesh. As dislocated as I had felt when I first stumbled into Varay, I at least had had a lot of training that helped me adapt and made it possible for me to respond to an immediate crisis. Aaron hadn’t had that advantage, and his early days in the buffer zone had been infinitely more dislocating than mine. It wasn’t just the way he suddenly appeared in Varay, or even his impossibly rapid growth. I remembered Aaron the way I first saw him in the great hall of Castle Basil, a scared little kid trying to sound brave with fake street talk. That was all gone, the street jargon, the pretense, the little kid. His speech had become homogenized—middle-class, middle-America—and I don’t think it was the usual translation magic doing it.

  That all hit me at once. I guess I stopped walking and stared at him.

  “We all do what we have to do,” Aaron said—as if he were reading my mind.

  I shook my head. “How the hell have you managed to cope with all that’s happened to you the last few months?” I asked.

  Just for an instant, he slipped back—figuratively—into the little kid I first met. “It ain’t easy, bro,” he said. He grinned, and then we both laughed.

  Parthet was in the great hall waiting for me, so nervous that he wasn’t even paying proper attention to the mug of beer in his hand. But I aimed Aaron at him and held myself to a quick greeting and a single question.

  “Have you found out yet what I have to do with the balls?”

  He shook his head. “No, but we can conjure on them all we want now that you have them back.” He held out his hand for them, and I laughed.

  “It’s not that easy,” I said. “Aaron can tell you all about it. I’ve got to get home to Joy now. We’ll talk tomorrow.” I felt my smile wither. “Maybe a lot sooner,” I said. Parthet looked from me to Aaron, then up—in the direction of the king’s chambers.

  I nodded, then collected my entourage and we went back to Cayenne.

  Castle Cayenne had been my home for more than three years, but it still didn’t have all the emotional connotations of home. It was part of my home, but with the magical doorways, home was an entire complex—Castle Cayenne, Castle Basil, my condo in Chicago, and the house in Louisville. My parents’ house in Louisville remained part of the construct mostly on the strength of memory and childhood ties. I rarely went there except when I knew that Mother was in Varay. During the years between the defeat and death of the Etevar of Dorthin and the nuking of the Coral Lady, I had become accustomed to the double life I was leading, and even enjoyed it most of the time. I could understand the way my father had always seemed to enjoy life so fully while I was growing up … if not the way he and mother had concealed Varay and my heritage from me.

  I enjoyed the life, and sometimes I got completely hysterical just thinking about it. I mean, in Chicago, I played the part of the rich young bachelor in search of the good life, good times, and the perfect party. But by simply stepping through a secret doorway, I suddenly became the Hero of Varay, Prince Gil of Varay, complete with costumes, fancy weapons, and a complete mythos. I was like Batman/Bruce Wayne with his Bat Cave, Superman/Clark Kent with his Fortress of Solitude. And sometimes I just got carried away with how ridiculous the entire concept was. At times I reached a point where I couldn’t take either world completely seriously. I would hear people pooh-poohing magic, or fantasy literature, or whatnot, and I’d think how wrong they were, and how scared they would be if I hauled them off through a doorway into Varay and left them to find out for themselves. And in Varay, I’d catch sight of myself in a mirror—all duded up in my Hero garb with two long swords over my shoulders, maybe with bow, chain-mail shirt, and Cubs cap, and it would be all I could do to keep from collapsing on the floor in laughter. “Put that in your computer,” I’d tell myself.

  But death could be a sobering reality in either world. My first time in Varay, I had buried my father and watched a supposedly immortal elf warrior die fighting a dragon. I had seen men and trolls die—been the agent of death in many cases. I had killed and come close to dying myself. Killing does more to change you than the other does. It’s something you can never forget, never get away from. It becomes a permanent part of you.

  I think that’s why I visited the crypt below Castle Basil so often. It gave me the sense of reality that I so desperately needed if I wanted to avoid slipping off into total insanity.

  It’s also why I occasionally went out and got stinking drunk in the real world, where it’s not nearly as hard to do as it is in the buffer zone. Lesh and I would hit a bar, or a series of bars, and drink as fast as we did in Varay, where the magic of the seven kingdoms converted alcohol to sugar almost as fast as anyone could drink. Alcohol meant calories, just as food did, and the overall magic that maintained the buffer zone between Fairy and the mortal world would use any calories it could get.

  Even wasting an old man away to a living ghost to get them.

  Sometimes I think too much. I was ready for another heavy drunk, but I knew I couldn’t spare the time.

  Joy and I had one of those rousing greetings like those they used to show in the war movies: the ship docks in the States and the heroes go down to the pier and their wives or girlfriends are there to greet them—the big hugs, the whirling around, the kisses that are so passionate that you wonder that they don’t lead to more frantic action right there in public.

  Home is the sailor, home from the sea.

  And the hunter home from the hill.

  Our marriage was still new enough that Joy and I both had the same first impulse, to head for the bed
room and finish the reunion in the proper manner, but we had to put that on hold for a while. In Varay, eating comes before anything else, even sex. I was still famished, Joy had enough of an appetite of her own, and it was almost suppertime anyway. I think the first thing Lesh did when we stepped through to Cayenne was to head for the scullery to tell the cooks that we were all back so double everything for supper. Meals in Varay are protracted enough to get away with that. You start with what’s already on hand while the extras are cooking.

  I told Joy about Pregel. I also told her that we had gotten what we went north for, but that there was still more work to do once we found out what to do with the, ah, relics. I didn’t give her any details of the quest … and I didn’t tell her where the old family jewels were at the moment. I wanted to save that until we were alone and I found out whether or not they were going to interfere with my love life. I was starting to worry about that.

  “I’ve been learning to ride,” Joy told me as we headed for the supper table. “Jaffa has been teaching me.” Jaffa was one of our new pages.

  “Any interesting bruises?” I asked, leaning close to whisper in her ear. Everyone was gathering for the meal, and that wasn’t the kind of question I wanted to share with all the help.

  “You’ll have to find that out for yourself,” Joy said, hurrying on ahead of me to the table.

  I kept dozing off during supper, and that’s something I never do, certainly not in Varay. Lesh carried most of the table talk. He told about our adventures, some of them, but he was circumspect enough to omit the parts that didn’t belong in the same room as food. I doubt that any of the Varayans would have been shocked at even the worst of it, but I still had a few civilized sensibilities and Joy wasn’t completely acclimated yet, and Lesh recognized that. When he got to the bit about the room full of jewels in the shrine up in the Mist—walls completely studded with diamonds, rubies, and emeralds, with piles of precious stones almost waist-deep in the corners of the room—Lesh had everyone’s attention. Some of the castle folk even forgot to keep shoveling the food into their faces for a moment.

  What a letdown they’ll have when they find out that we didn’t bring any of those jewels back except the ones we had to have, I thought. They’re going to want to see some of those treasures, and they can’t see the two we have. Not with them lodged securely between my legs.

  Surprise.

  “How many did you bring back?” somebody asked Lesh.

  Someone else said, “Can we see some of them?”

  Lesh chuckled, and that opened my eyes. He looked my way and grinned, then he started digging into his pack. I hadn’t even noticed that he had set the pack next to the table. Glittering bits of precious stones tumbled out on the table, the stuff that dreams are made of back in the other world. Even in Varay, rather blasé about riches most of the time, the shiny gems drew oohs and ahs.

  “I didn’t know you were so quick with your hands, Lesh,” I said when he glanced my way again.

  “I got some too,” Harkane confessed, and then Timon blushed and nodded, so I knew that he had joined in on the grabbing.

  I grinned and shook my head. “Why not,” I said, and then I laughed. It seemed that I was the only one who had been too busy to grab a few extra goodies. Or maybe not, I thought then. Aaron was wearing the elf’s head. He probably didn’t think to grab anything extra either. Besides, he was still carrying that sea serpent around inside when we were in the room of jewels.

  Enough of that train of thought.

  “Have you liberators thought about what you’re going to do with all those jewels?” I asked. There certainly wasn’t much of a market for them in Varay.

  Lesh got an embarrassed look on his face and shrugged. The others just shook their heads.

  After supper, Joy and I headed up to the bedroom and I told her where the balls of the Great Earth Mother were. When I stripped to take a soak in the tub, Joy had to count for herself. That raised an erection, so I knew that there was still some life in me.

  “I was worried abut that,” I told her. I didn’t mention that I was still very tender down there. Getting the extra family jewels in position had hurt like hell.

  “Damn well better not mess up a good thing,” Joy said. She climbed into the tub with me. It’s big enough to hold three or four people without any crowding, though we’ve never tried it with more than the two of us. It was just sunset, so the water tank up on top of the castle still had plenty of hot water in it. The water was almost too hot.

  We made love soaking wet, on the bedroom floor so we wouldn’t get the bed sloppy. After the first bout, another bath, and a sensuous session with the bath towels, we did a rematch on the bed. By the time we finished that, I was almost asleep and trying to fight it off. I do have some sense of manners.

  “I’ve got something to tell you,” Joy said, snuggling closer against me.

  I mumbled something that didn’t take the effort of words.

  “We’re going to have a baby.”

  That woke me all the way. I sat straight up, dumping her head from my shoulder. Okay, I had seen a lot of magic, but … “You know that fast? We just got done.”

  And Joy started laughing hysterically. It was several minutes before she calmed down enough to inform me that my elevator wasn’t going all the way to the penthouse. She had suspected that she was pregnant before I headed into the Mist. Now she was sure.

  Finally, we got to sleep.

  It was about one-thirty in the morning when Aaron came from Basil with the news I had been expecting.

  3

  The Crypt and the Crown

  “About ten minutes ago,” Aaron said when Joy and I had pulled on robes and called him into the bedroom. “Quietly. He never regained consciousness. I came straight here.”

  Joy and I got dressed and ready to cross back to Castle Basil. I was in full regalia. I hadn’t even needed Lesh’s reminder to know that it would be expected. Joy and I led quite a procession. Aaron, Lesh, Harkane, and Timon went along, as did Jaffa and Rodi, our new pages.

  The scene in the great hall of Castle Basil didn’t look like the middle of the night. There were kegs of beer being tapped, and there was plenty of cold food sitting on the table. People would eat. People had to eat, no matter what. And there were a lot of people about, standing around, looking glum. Pregel had been King of Varay for more than a century. Except for Parthet, there wasn’t anyone in the kingdom who could remember a time when he wasn’t king.

  When Joy and I entered the great hall, a lot of eyes turned our way and the soft conversations died away. We didn’t linger. A guard told me that the king hadn’t been brought down from his room yet, so Joy and I headed that way while the rest of our people stayed in the great hall.

  Mother, Parthet, and Kardeen were in the bedroom with Pregel. The catafalque on which Grandfather would rest during the vigil had been brought in, but the king hadn’t been moved onto it yet for the journey down to the chapel—the royal shrine to the Great Earth Mother.

  I knew what the procedure would be, in a general way. Baron Kardeen had warned me what to expect one time before when Grandfather had seemed to be in particularly precarious condition. The rituals would be much the same as they had been for my father. I would be the chief mourner this time, since I was Grandfather’s heir—whether I was ready for the job or not. The vigil would last until dawn. Then we would have a formal procession down to the crypt. Grandfather would be placed into his niche. That had been completed while I was out on the Mist. Before we left the burial chamber, there would be a brief ceremony investing me as King of Varay. It wouldn’t be a fancy coronation, just a simple thing with the sword of state, the one Pregel had used when he named me Hero of Varay after Dad was sealed into the wall of the crypt.

  Gil Tyner, King of Varay? I guess that didn’t sound any more or less ridiculous than anything else about the buffer zone.

  Baron Kardeen and I lifted Pregel from the bed and moved him to the catafalque. Grandfather
couldn’t have weighed eighty pounds, if that. Mother had dressed him in his fanciest clothes. He wore a jeweled chain around his neck. That would come off before he was interred. It was part of the regalia of office. The chain, the sword of state, and a scepter that looked a little like a stage magician’s phony wand were the main trappings of the job. There was no crown, nothing like a crown.

  We carried grandfather from the bedroom down to the main level, through the great hall into the shrine. We picked up people as we went, turning this into something of a preliminary procession. Everyone followed us into the shrine. Four soldiers from the castle guard carried the king and set the catafalque on a platform at the front of the chapel, under the eyes of the large painting of the Great Earth Mother.

  The painting made me nervous, even though the figure didn’t look anything at all like the apparition of the Great Earth Mother that I had seen in her island shrine. In fact, just being in another one of her shrines made me edgy under the circumstances. It didn’t matter that this was just one of the “ordinary” shrines that had been built by mortals and not one of the special, out-of-the-way colossuses that she had supposedly built—or given birth to—herself. I couldn’t help but feel that she might appear—step out of that painting even—to have her revenge against me.

  Parthet disappeared for nearly an hour without explanation, but when the rest of Varay’s barons started to enter the shrine, I knew where he had gone—jumping from castle to castle to spread the news and to send the kingdom’s nobles through the system of magic doorways to witness the funeral and the succession. Duke Dieth was the first to arrive, so I knew that Parthet had even made the jump over to Carsol, the capital of Dorthin. Dieth and each of the barons came in and knelt at the side of the catafalque for a moment, then came over and knelt before me. The embarrassment that caused me helped me get my mind off of the picture of the Great Earth Mother that was staring at me. Joy was as embarrassed as I was by the ritual. She gripped my arm tightly every time one of the peers came over to us.