The Hero of Varay Read online

  I enjoyed standing on the battlements of Cayenne or Basil alone, day or night. It wasn’t just that I was still a kid inside, though that is probably part of the answer. The surroundings are perfect for thinking, for meditating, even for brooding. That night, I was uneasy about a lot of things. The nuking of the Coral Lady was still a frightening topic. No nuclear weapon had been used against people anywhere in the world since the end of World War Two. That wasn’t just before I was born, it was before my father was born, if only by a few weeks. Then there was Aaron’s mysterious appearance to ponder, Parthet’s uncommon anger over being forced to turn him loose, and his prediction that things would get worse in a hurry. Even the talking head of the dead elf would be enough to haunt anyone’s night, awake or asleep.

  I hadn’t forgotten the dead elf.

  Soon, very soon, I was going to have to broach that issue back at Castle Basil. We had to do something permanent with the dead elf. Maybe Uncle Parthet thought he had a new toy to play with, keeping the head of the elf in a vat of alcohol, but I wouldn’t rest easy until the son of the Elflord of Xayber was put out for the birds, or buried, or something. If the head could talk to Parthet, it could probably also talk to the elflord, his father, and we didn’t need a spy of that nature around. Xayber would be after me again soon enough without the head of his dead son urging revenge.

  The stars moved overhead, the constellations of the buffer zone—the Cooper, the Warlord, the Twin Horses, others that I didn’t recognize right off yet. The groupings of stars were different from any I knew from Earth. I would have been delighted to see at least one familiar constellation, Orion the Hunter, for example, but he didn’t hunt the skies over the seven kingdoms.

  I started shivering after just a few minutes up on the battlements, and I decided that I wasn’t dressed for a long session of brooding. Besides, it was time to wake Joy and Aaron and get started toward Joliet. It had to be near dawn in Illinois.

  Joy had rolled over on her side and stopped snoring. I lit one of the oil lamps in the bedroom and started to get dressed before I called her name. She moaned something unintelligible and rolled over again, but she woke instantly the second time I called her. She sat straight up, eyes open wide. I guess she had just remembered where she was.

  “It wasn’t a dream,” were her first words.

  I went to her and kissed her before I said, “Varay? No, it’s not a dream. And it’s time to get up.”

  She looked at the window. It was still pitch-black outside.

  “It’s the middle of the night!” she said.

  “It is here, almost three-thirty,” I said. “But that makes it about six-thirty in Chicago. There’s a time difference.”

  “Where is this place then, Iceland?”

  “You’ve got your zones moving in the wrong direction,” I said.

  “I don’t mean that, I mean the temperature.”

  “It’s not that cold,” I said.

  “Cold?” She dropped the blanket she had been holding around her. She had goose bumps all over. “It is too that cold.” She pulled the blanket back up.

  “Time to get dressed, dear,” I said, holding back a laugh. “Which suitcase do you need?”

  “Both of them.”

  That figures, I thought. I got the two bags and set them up on the bed close to her. One held underwear, sweaters, and blouses. The other held skirts, slacks and jeans, and two extra pairs of shoes. Joy started to dress warm.

  “It’s probably hotter than hell in Chicago,” I warned as she pulled on a heavy sweater.

  “Then I’ll change at your apartment. I’ve still got some things there. I’m worried about freezing before we get there.”

  “I’ll get Aaron,” I said, turning away so Joy wouldn’t see me grin.

  My mention of Aaron slowed Joy down for a moment. “I feel so sorry for him,” she said.

  “Me too. But we’ve got to get him back to whatever family he has left before Parthet gets too possessive.”

  “Is your uncle always like that?”

  “That’s hard to say.” I stopped and stared vaguely at Joy for a moment. “I’ve never seen him like that before, but ‘always’ covers something over twelve hundred years in his case.”

  “You’re kidding.” Joy came out from under the blanket long enough to slip on panties and blue jeans—quickly, then heavy socks and tennis shoes.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “He was only admitting to a thousand when I first came here, but one time I caught him talking about Charlemagne’s court as though he had actually been there and he admitted it. That takes him back to A.D. 800 or thereabouts, and he claims to have known Merlin and Camelot, so that drags it back even farther.”

  Joy stared at me, all thought of the cold shoved aside for a bit. “You’re serious,” she said. She turned to sit on the edge of the bed. “You’re really serious.”

  “I am. Get him talking about history sometime. You’ll see.”

  Joy stood up, raised the sweater to pull the jeans up where they belonged, snapped and zipped, then rearranged the sweater. I wished that we had more time. I would have liked to watch her take everything off again.

  “It’s part of being a wizard,” I said. “They live virtually forever unless something violent happens to them. But the price is sterility—no lads, no way, no how. And Parthet wants to initiate Aaron. I told him that Aaron’s too young to make that kind of decision.”

  “I certainly hope you told him. But … your uncle is really that old?”

  “He’s probably a lot older than that even.” I took a deep breath. There was something I hadn’t planned on mentioning to Joy just yet, but … “Down below the cellar of Basil Castle, there is a crypt with the remains of all the kings and heroes of Varay. But there aren’t any wizards buried there, not a one. The other tombs go back a couple of thousand years beyond what Parthet admits.”

  “You think he’s been around that long?”

  “I don’t know. He never gives me a straight answer, and nobody else around here is old enough to remember a time when he didn’t look the way he does now. The king is only one hundred and twenty-eight.”

  “Only?” Joy got up and we shared a too-brief kiss.

  “Only. I’ll go get Aaron,” I said again. “We can have breakfast back in Illinois.”

  Joy sat on the edge of the bed again to wait until I got Aaron. Aaron was still sleeping, so I just picked him up and carried him down from the sixth floor. Timon woke, but he’s always been a light sleeper, afraid I’ll want something and he won’t hear me call the first time. Aaron didn’t make a sound. I needed both hands to open the doorway to Chicago, but Joy held Aaron for the few seconds that took. Aaron was quite a load for her, though.

  As soon as we were through the passage, I took Aaron back. He still didn’t wake. I laid him on my bed in Chicago. Joy beat me to the bathroom in the master suite, so I went out and used the other bathroom for a quick shower. Joy hadn’t come out yet when I finished, so I turned on the television in the living room, volume low, to check out the morning news before we got too far away from the escape hatches to Varay.

  The Coral Lady was obviously still the main topic, and the damage done to western Florida. Main topic? It was the only story anyone was talking about. It was the traditional off-season for tourists in Florida, but traditional seasons don’t mean as much in Florida as they used to. With the Disney complex not all that far away at Orlando, tourism wasn’t nearly as seasonal as it had once been. There were still so many visitors around that it might be weeks before anyone could make an even halfway accurate estimate of onshore casualties. The Air Force had a lot of planes in the air checking radioactivity levels and the direction of drift of the radioactivity. Two full divisions of the Army had been moved to the perimeter of the affected area to deal with refugees, to try to cut down on looting, and generally to try to restore order. Many of the medical people who had gone to Chernobyl a few years before were gathering to help in Florida—except for
one doctor who had been on the Coral Lady. Casualties were being airlifted to hospitals as far away as San Antonio and Baltimore for treatment.

  The press were getting frustrated at their inability to get camera crews into the area on the ground, and most of their aerial footage had to be shot from a distance as well. But there was finally some tape of the devastation: the missing span of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, the wreckage of the remainder, the ruins and ashes ashore. Fires were still burning out of control around much of the perimeter of Tampa Bay. The “conservative” estimates predicted a minimum of sixty-five hundred dead, fifteen thousand injured or exposed to immediately dangerous levels of radiation, perhaps millions facing long-term health problems as a result, and two and a half million people displaced, either permanently or temporarily. The monetary cost had only the vaguest estimates yet, but they started at fifty billion dollars and climbed to over a trillion.

  “That wasn’t a dream either,” Joy whispered. I hadn’t heard her come into the room.

  “No, no dream. It’s going to take forever to clean up after this one.”

  Joy put her hands on my shoulders. “This world will never be the same.” I think she was talking about the nuclear bomb, but maybe she was thinking about her introduction to Varay too.

  “I’m afraid that the Coral Lady won’t be the only case like this,” I said. “The genie’s out of the bottle and we may not be able to get him back in.” Like when car bombs become so faddish. “It’s a miracle it’s taken this long. You remember that A-bomb they found in New York a few years ago?”

  “I remember.”

  “It may have been the same batch of terrorists. Or different people with the same idea. There’s tons of uranium and plutonium unaccounted for.”

  Joy shook her head. “The sooner we get started, the sooner we get back,” she said.

  I nodded. I was ready to change the subject too.

  “I just hope Eddie kept my car going the last three months.” Eddie was the day man down in the building’s garage. I paid him to run the car a couple of times a week while I was “traveling” to keep the battery charged.

  * * *

  It was still too early for Eddie to be on duty, but my LeBaron started right off, so I knew that he had been doing his job. The odometer reading hadn’t changed, but the low-fuel light started blinking as soon as I turned the key in the ignition. Aaron finally woke up while I was backing out of my parking space.

  “Where are we?” he asked, his voice still sleepy.

  “We’re in Chicago, Aaron,” I said. “We’re on our way to Joliet now.”

  “I’m going home?” I couldn’t tell what he was feeling, disappointment, sadness, or a mixture of both.

  “Yes, you’re going home,” I said, and I had to be careful to keep any emotion out of my voice. But Aaron curled up as best he could under the seat belt in the backseat and he went to sleep again.

  We had got an early enough start to stay ahead of the worst of the rush-hour traffic downtown. I took Lake Shore Drive down to the Stevenson Expressway and got on that for the straight run out to Joliet. Traffic never got completely insane that morning, and even the inbound traffic across the median seemed a lot lighter than usual. I suspected that a lot of people had decided that it was a good day to play hooky from work, to keep up with the latest news … or just in case there was any more trouble like the bombing in Florida.

  Joy found Silver Cross Hospital marked on the map in my glove compartment, but I still had to stop and ask directions when we got to Joliet. The main entrance to the hospital was just opening up as we arrived.

  Aaron had slept the whole way out. I had to wake him when we reached the hospital. I didn’t want to carry him inside and maybe cause misunderstandings.

  I hated every second of the hospital ordeal. A volunteer at the front desk directed us to Family Services. There were people waiting for us there—hospital people, a police officer, and a couple who introduced themselves as Aaron’s aunt and uncle. Aaron went to them and started carrying on about the wonderful things that had happened to him, while it was all the aunt and uncle could manage to keep from bawling from their grief and their anxiety over Aaron. The uncle thanked me for bringing Aaron in and for taking care of him. When he asked where we had found him, I repeated the story I had told on the telephone. The cop stopped frowning. I was worried that he would ask a lot of uncomfortable official questions, but he started listening to Aaron’s tale of knights and castles and a funny old wizard and he forgot all about Joy and me. We were able to slip away like the Lone Ranger and Tonto, and we got out of the hospital almost as quickly as I had hoped to.

  Once we were out of the parking lot and on our way back to the Interstate, I breathed a lot easier.

  “They’ll assume that his story is just a reaction to the shock of losing his parents,” I said. “What else could they think?” When Joy didn’t reply, I looked her way. She was just staring straight forward. Tears were running down her cheek.

  “He’ll be okay, Joy. He’ll do fine.”

  She nodded a little at that, but she still didn’t speak, so I turned on the radio and we listened to the still-continuous coverage of the Coral Lady disaster.

  The drive back to Chicago went a little slower than the ride out, but traffic still wasn’t up to its usual rush-hour madness. Joy and I said virtually nothing the entire drive. She wasn’t quite up to breakfast yet, so we went straight back to my place. Food could wait a little while. We pulled into the garage under my apartment building before nine-thirty.

  In the elevator going up to thirty-eight, Joy clung to me and I held her. She still wasn’t talking.

  “We’ve still got time to make breakfast at Castle Basil,” I said when we got inside the apartment. She just nodded.

  Before we left for Varay, I went through the place twice, making sure that I didn’t leave anything turned on, making sure that I wasn’t forgetting anything I might really want in Varay. It was almost as if I was leaving the place for good. That realization hit me, and I stopped abruptly in the living room. I forced myself to look around the room, almost casually. I did feel as though I might never see the apartment again, even though it was only a doorway away from Cayenne, Basil, or Louisville. I didn’t say anything about the feeling to Joy, but it made me very uneasy. It wasn’t exactly like a warning from my danger sense, but after the Coral Lady, I didn’t need much to set me on edge.

  I was shaking my head when Joy and I stepped through to Cayenne. I needed to stop there before we went on to Basil.

  Since we had been gone for a while, I went to the door leading out to the hall and stairs, planning to go downstairs to check in, so to speak. But Lesh was waiting just outside the door.

  “I knocked before, lord,” he said. “When you didn’t answer, I figured you weren’t back from taking the boy home.”

  “We got him safely delivered,” I said.

  “You told me to remind you about Harkane and Timon.”

  I nodded. That was something that had come up during the goodwill tour. Timon was old enough to move up from page to squire. Harkane would become a full-fledged man-at-arms, ready to be knighted as soon as he proved himself in the interim capacity. Both would remain in my service, as my retinue continued to grow. But Timon’s promotion meant that I needed a new page to take his place.

  “I’ll speak to Baron Kardeen about them today if I get the chance,” I said. “Joy and I are going through to Basil for breakfast. You want to come along, or is there enough to eat here?”

  Lesh grinned. “We’ll manage, especially since you two’ll be gone.”

  I grinned back at him. Getting Lesh to loosen up had been difficult. He was still more impressed with my position than I was, but at least he was willing to open up a little now and then.

  “I’ll send Timon right up for you,” he said.

  I started to object, but quickly changed my mind. I had to have a page at Basil, probably two of them now that Joy was with me. Protocol.
Tradition. Varay was basically feudal in nature, and anyone with any kind of social status had to have servants. “Then maybe he can help choose his own replacement,” I said, and Lesh nodded.

  “What was all that about?” Joy asked after Lesh clomped down the stairs. I explained the basics as quickly as I could.

  “They put a lot of stock in formalities and rank and such here,” I said. “I knighted Lesh three years ago. Sometimes I think he’s still not comfortable with it—any more than I’m really comfortable with all the nonsense that goes with my titles.”

  Timon came racing up the stairs so soon after Lesh went down that he must have been waiting for the summons. Timon was grinning all the way up the stairs. It was a big day for him, like making the move from grade school to high school, I guess—something like it anyway.

  Joy, Timon, and I stepped through to Castle Basil and made our way down to the great hall just as the sun was making itself visible for the day. I wore my knife and both elf swords, and Joy’s arm was linked through mine. Timon stepped out in front as we reached the great hall to announce us.

  But I didn’t hear one word he said. I glanced toward the head table and received one of the biggest shocks of my life.

  Aaron was sitting up there next to Parthet.

  Parthet stood up quickly when I started hurrying across the great hall. He held up a hand like a traffic cop trying to get cars to stop.