Son of the Hero Page 6

  “I wish you every luck,” Baron Kardeen said, standing next to my horse—Gold—and holding the pommel of my saddle. “Your coming has meant a lot to His Majesty. Come back safely.”

  “I’ll try. Thanks for your help.”

  Kardeen bowed and backed off. I nodded—regally, I hoped—and clicked at my horse. Gold started up and I aimed him at the gate. Parthet moved into place at my left, about two feet below me on his smaller horse. Lesh and Timon got into line behind us.

  I didn’t look back.

  5

  Precarra

  Castle Basil was located on a prominence that looked remarkably like the Rock of Gibraltar in the insurance commercials. The rock was stained by water and waste that had dripped from the castle over the ages. There was only one road into or out of the castle. It wound back and forth through a series of wicked switchbacks down a steep slope to Basil Town. The town was more a village, maybe three hundred buildings—homes, shops, and whatnot. According to Parthet, there were two good inns. “They both brew a decent enough beer” was how he phrased it. The River Tarn came from the north, past the east side of the castle’s rock, and wrapped around the south end of the town. “It bends north again farther west to finally empty into the Mist,” Parthet said.

  Basil Town was aromatic, but it didn’t smell like the herb. Smell? Stench. I guess all towns must have smelled like that before indoor plumbing and municipal sewage works. At least no one emptied a chamber pot into the street while we rode through.

  People stared openly at us as we passed. Craftsmen worked in their open-front shops and directed apprentices. I saw a cooper assembling a barrel, a miller hauling flour bags to a small cart that was hitched to two dogs who didn’t look far removed from their lupine ancestry. There were women sweeping out their homes, a lot of them. They might almost have had a union schedule that said, “Sweep the dirt out the front door at such and such a time.”

  We passed one of the pubs, stared at it with longing, but didn’t stop. Maybe we could have afforded time for a single drink, but I didn’t know how we would pay. I didn’t have any local currency, and I didn’t expect that Parthet did. I couldn’t impose on Lesh or the boy, even assuming that one or the other might have a coin or two.

  A few minutes after we passed the pub, our horses clomped across a rickety wooden bridge over the Tarn into the Forest of Precarra. The bridge shimmied and shuddered as if ready to fall into the river, but none of my companions showed the slightest apprehension about using it, so I kept my worries to myself. The river wasn’t much of a stream, about forty feet wide and shallow. But the bank was steep and high on the town side.

  The transition from town to forest was abrupt. There were only a few small farms on the east side of the river. Most of the Basiliers’ farms lay west of town, according to Parthet. We crossed the narrow strip of cleared fields and entered the forest.

  “Precarra covers about a fifth of the kingdom,” Parthet said, “from the southwest corner to the middle of our border with Dorthin—a rough horn shape with the bell flat against the Titans and the mouthpiece sticking into the Etevar’s domain. Southeast of the forest the land is wrinkled with foothills and long valleys. It’s an area for sheep, cattle, and grapes, but mostly it’s left to wilderness. There are some evil places there. Northwest of Precarra is where most of our farmland is, and a few fishing villages along the Mist. Then there’s Battle Forest toward the isthmus, north and northeast of here. Few Varayans live in that quarter.”

  Lesh snorted. “There are farms everywhere,” he said. “The forest isn’t a blanket. There are gaps all around, some natural, more made by folks who need space to plant their beans and taters. Peasants can’t wait for strangers to send them food from someplace else.”

  Our ride was no mad gallop. We let the horses stick to a fast walk most of the time, a gait that would allow them to keep going for the five or six days we might need to get to Thyme and back. During the hottest part of the first day, we stopped to rest the animals and get ourselves out of the sun for a few minutes every hour or so. We had a long way to go. When we talked, it wasn’t about Castle Thyme or what might have happened to my parents. I couldn’t fully accept the danger yet, not on a gut level. We talked about Varay and Fairy, and about ourselves. Mostly, I listened and let the others talk. I was the new kid on the block and I had a lot to learn.

  “Tell me about yourself, Lesh,” I said, early in the ride.

  “What’s to tell, lord? I’m a soldier. I’ve always been a soldier.”

  “Where were you raised? What was it like at home? Even a soldier has a history.”

  “I was born in County Gemma, somewhat south of Castle Thyme. My folks farmed a small clay patch. Of six children, only four of us made it out of the cradle. I worked on the farm until I was old enough to join the King’s Guard. I’ve been a soldier ever since, nigh on thirty years. Like I said, what’s to tell?”

  I looked back at him: a bored face, uncomfortable talking about himself.

  “Are you married? Do you have children of your own?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve never been married formal-like. As to brats, who can tell?”

  The willows and birches that flanked a creek alongside the path gave way to oaks, chestnuts, and firs. The air cooled a little in the shade.

  “Do you know Castle Thyme?” I asked.

  “I’ve been there, lord,” Lesh admitted. “It’s not much of a castle, not nearly so grand or strong as Castle Basil. Thyme is little more than a single tower with a puny curtain wall behind a dry ditch.”

  “Not much to the eye but important,” Parthet contributed. “It has been fought over so often that the magics around it are quite unpredictable.”

  “Let’s leave that till tomorrow,” I suggested. I didn’t want to cram my head full of porcupines yet. Magic. So far, all I had seen was the doorways, and while I couldn’t explain them logically, that didn’t mean that there was no logical explanation—something out of science fiction maybe, something like folded space.

  “How far have we traveled?” Timon asked when we took our first break. The boy was dressed in forest green, in an outfit that looked as though it had been handed down several times. He wore a long dagger on his belt. Timon was skinny but nearly as tall as Parthet. The boy’s voice was still childish, high-pitched. His hair was lopped off simply at the sides and back.

  “About seven miles,” Parthet said.

  “I’ve never been this far before.” Timon didn’t seem nearly as awed by being assigned to serve the heir of Varay as he was at being seven miles from home.

  “And what’s your life been like, Timon?” I asked. I was sitting on the ground, leaning back against a cedar, trying to put my weight on parts of my butt that the saddle hadn’t chafed. A difficult quest.

  “My mam works in the kitchen at the castle. I’ve been scrubbing pots as far back as I know.”

  “You get any schooling?”

  “I can read a little, and write my name,” Timon said proudly.

  “Education is a practical matter here,” Parthet said. “Children learn what they need to know by doing it, by apprenticeship and imitation.”

  “No need to sound so defensive, Uncle,” I said, not even glancing his way. “I wasn’t going to criticize. It’s a good way to learn practical affairs. As long as you’re not building computers or H-bombs.”

  “We have no need of those things here,” Parthet said.

  “No H-bombs?” No kidding, I thought. “That may be the best news I’ve heard since I left school. What would happen to the buffer zone if my world blew itself to hell in a nuclear war?” Parthet sat next to me. I was confident that he knew what I was talking about. He had visited us often enough in Louisville.

  “I’ve wondered about that more often than you might imagine,” he said. “I don’t have an answer, though.” He looked off into the trees, and his voice got reflective. “It frightens me when I think about it. I fear that Fairy would overflow us and move into th
e void. What might happen then, I can’t even guess. I don’t think it’s something I’d care to experience.”

  Timon looked back and forth between us, his eyes wide with wonder. It may have sounded like gibberish to him. Or maybe he simply assumed that we were discussing magics beyond his capacity. Maybe we were, come to think of it. Nuclear winter sounds beyond the limits of objective possibility to me too, like witches and wizards and elflords out of Fairy. I wondered how the buffer zone’s translation magic had rendered “H-bombs” and “nuclear war.”

  “Whenever your world is at war, Fairy grows stronger here,” Parthet said. He shrugged. “Of course, there is always war of one dimension or another going on there, but major war is what I’m talking about. I remember your Second World War. I think that’s what your father called it. Before he was born. The seven kingdoms were all hard pressed to hold their own against a series of invasions out of Fairy—that’s when your mother’s parents were killed—and we’re still trying to clear out the last of the dragons and a few outlaw bands of elves.”

  I missed something in that at the time, the bit about my mother’s parents being killed during the Second World War, which meant that she was also older than I’d thought. I didn’t recall what Parthet had said until much later.

  “Shouldn’t we be moving on?” Lesh asked.

  I looked up and nodded. We had taken more of a break than I had planned. It was maybe an hour later before I brought up the subject of the dragons again. I described the lizards I had seen the day before.

  “Is that what you call a dragon?” I asked.

  “You saw one of those near my cottage?” Parthet asked, a bit stridently.

  “Two of them, one in the forest and another in the cave where I came through from our basement. Were those dragons?”

  “Dragonkind, but not dragons. Bad enough if you’re not careful. You saw one of those near my cottage?” he asked again.

  “Yes, not too far off. What’s wrong with that?”

  “There shouldn’t be any of those creatures within fifty miles of my home, that’s what’s wrong. They usually don’t stray far from Battle Forest.”

  “They didn’t look all that dangerous,” I said, crossing my fingers mentally. The one in the cave had looked dangerous enough at the time.

  “Those beasts can bite you in two like that.” Parthet slapped his hands together. Timon’s pony shied at the noise. The heavier chargers didn’t pay any mind. And Parthet’s Glory just pointed his ears, as if he didn’t have the energy to get upset at the noise. I swallowed, remembering my first encounter with one of the lizards.

  “They can be hunted at least,” Lesh said before I could wander too far down memory lane. “But they make foul eating, nothing you’d care to taste if you had any choice.” He looked at the sky. “They can be hunted, not like a real dragon. A real dragon hunts you.”

  “How big?” I asked, not at all certain that I wanted to know. I looked at the sky myself.

  “Like a castle with wings,” Lesh said.

  “Try thinking of something like a 747 with bigger wings and a badly swollen gut,” Parthet suggested. “A pregnant 747. That would make a small dragon. They’re hungry all the time. The four of us and our horses wouldn’t make a decent bedtime snack for a dragon.” After that, there were three of us looking at the sky. Only Parthet didn’t bother.

  “How many dragons are there?” I asked.

  “One’s too many,” Lesh said.

  “They don’t exactly fill out census questionnaires,” Parthet said. “But there can’t be many or the buffer kingdoms would soon be totally barren. I doubt there’s a half-dozen that come across our skies.”

  “Where do they live?”

  “Anywhere they want to,” Lesh said with an explosive laugh.

  Parthet scowled at him but nodded. “Sometimes they come in from the Mist. Sometimes they seem to nest in the Titan Mountains. They can fly from Mist to mountains in an hour.”

  “What does it take to kill one?”

  “A bigger dragon.” That was Lesh’s contribution. The subject of dragons really pushed all his buttons.

  “They have been killed by mortals,” Parthet said.

  “Can you show me one who did and lived to tell about it?” Lesh challenged. “Introduce us and I’ll buy his beer for ten years.”

  The way Parthet tried to fade into his saddle, I knew he couldn’t.

  Precarra seemed to change its nature every few miles. It wasn’t a homogenous forest at all, more like a number of different forests tacked together. For a time it would look tame around us, like a city park, and then the forest would go suddenly berserk in a mass of tangled underbrush. Groves of oak gave way to soaring fir trees, which gave way to willow and birch every time we came to a waterway. Creeks, some of them looking more like drainage ditches in a drought, were common. There were no bridges out in the country, only traces where generations of Varayans had forded each stream. The road—the others insisted on calling the rutted cart path we followed a road—wound through the forest from one ford to the next. So, though we were heading generally east, we might be moving in almost any direction at any given moment. Several times we saw smaller paths leading away from the road, narrow tracks as overgrown as the path to Uncle Parthet’s cottage. Once I spotted a field of young corn in a clearing ringed by burned stumps.

  “We should be coming to the village of Nushur soon,” Lesh said about mid-afternoon. My watch said five-fifty, but that was still Louisville time. “The last time I was over this way, the innkeeper had a potent brew for his guests. I could sure use a flagon or two.”

  “So could I,” I said, “but I don’t think anyone thought to equip us with ready cash.”

  “The crown’s credit is good,” Parthet said. “His Majesty’s bursar pays every reckoning promptly. Whatever our problems, poverty isn’t one of them.”

  “You mean all I have to do is charge it?” I asked.

  “It’s not American Express, but you wear the family rings. No one will refuse you service in Varay,” Parthet said.

  “We could have an early supper, and a drink or two, and ride on a few more miles before sunset,” I said. There were no dissenting votes.

  The anticipation of refreshments made the miles to Nushur seem longer. It took us an hour to reach the village—thirty homes and two larger buildings in the center. “The inn and the home of the local magistrate,” Parthet said.

  “Do we need to stop to see the magistrate?” I asked.

  “No need at all,” Parthet said. “Once he hears that you’re in his village, he’ll come to pay his respects. You outrank him.”

  We rode straight into the courtyard of the inn. It looked as though the walls were made of adobe, but the region didn’t seem dry enough for that. A herd of young boys came to care for our horses and to guide us to the inn’s public room. As we entered, the innkeeper came up, bowing and scraping. Lesh and I both had to duck our heads to avoid hitting the lintel over the doorway. The ceiling wasn’t much higher. The innkeeper led us to his largest table—there were only three in the room—and carried on at length about how honored he was to serve us and how excellent his kitchen and beers were. When Parthet “announced” me, the innkeeper got positively slobbering in his attempts to serve us. We were seated and served our first steins of beer before we knew what was going on. I was surprised that Timon was given beer, but nobody else was. Timon certainly didn’t object. He took a sip and smacked his lips.

  The beer was good even if it was just cool, not cold. Supper was a thick, gritty stew served in large wooden bowls. The bread was gritty too. I didn’t know if the grit was dirt or poor milling. I was too hungry to get overly fastidious. The stew meat was some kind of game; I didn’t ask what. But there were also potatoes, carrots, and loads of onion. The bread was in flat, rounded loaves like hamburger buns for the Jolly Green Giant, thick-crusted and chewy. Sopping up gravy was the best way to eat the bread.

  Except for Timon, we emptied ou
r beers quickly even though the mugs must have held more than a quart, and the landlord brought a second round. And a third while we dredged up the last traces of gravy from our second large bowls of stew with the last crusts of bread. It was a satisfying meal.

  The landlord asked if we wanted lodging for the night. Rather than approach me directly, he asked Lesh, who looked to Parthet, who looked to me.

  “We have to travel on, I’m afraid,” I said. “There’s still sun in the sky. But this has been an excellent meal, most satisfying.”

  The landlord’s head bobbed up and down at the compliment, but I think he was just as happy to see us move on. He was a nervous sort, and we were obviously not his usual trade. Parthet asked how much we owed, then dug a BIC pen and a three-by-five spiral notebook from some recess of his clothing, wrote out an IOU, and signed it. “The magistrate will make sure you get your money,” Parthet told the innkeeper. “By the way, we expected to see him. Is he out of town?”

  The innkeeper cackled and nodded. He started to explain but changed his mind after a glance my way. Whatever the juicy gossip was, we weren’t going to hear it.

  I felt more loaded down than ever as we walked back to the courtyard. Two and a half huge meals in one day, probably more food than I ate in a full week at college. A burger and fries or a couple of slices of pizza for lunch, maybe a decent supper three nights a week, junk food taken on the run the rest of the time, with a snack thrown in whenever my stomach complained that it was empty-that was my school diet.

  Our horses had been fed and groomed. They actually seemed eager to get started again.

  Past Nushur, the road tended to head northeast rather than east. I spent a few minutes studying the map that Kardeen’s clerk had prepared. Nushur was marked, and so was the road’s change of direction. The map didn’t show every nip and tuck, but it had the general layout fairly well. Varay east of Nushur got decidedly seedy-looking. The trees were shorter and scraggly with gnarled, knotty trunks and vegetation that looked wasted, more like the heat of summer than the bloom of spring. For long stretches, the road became a single trace scarcely wide enough for a rider, with branches hanging low enough over the path to be a serious hazard.