A Hero's Throne (An Ancient Earth) (25 page)

In this way he travelled across the universe, racing along the curved intersects and spokes from one gravity bridge to another, and one spinning star system to another, toward, he hoped, home.

After countless hops and jumps that took him through a tour of wonders that would still not be seen by those on earth for millennia, he came to his own galaxy and followed the curve of its shape down to his own system, which was like entering a tiny little hovel at the end of a short cul-de-sac and then sitting in the smallest chair in the tiniest room. His whole world—everything he’d ever known—was so small and overcrowded that he didn’t know how he could possibly tolerate the feeling of being so tightly hemmed in ever again.

And as he came closer to it and to the silver string-like path that his planet followed, he saw the string start to vibrate, picking up the sympathetic notes that the moon, the sun, and the other planets created. It twisted and spun in three dimensions and created a purple gravity bridge that drew him in and rocketed him to another system in another galaxy—a larger planet with a larger sun, populated by creatures from another evolutionary tree.

Comet-like, he fell into the planet, in the thin sliver than ran
across its circumference where the light side met the dark. Its movement became his, and its gravity held him completely. The sudden stop of movement was jarring and stole his breath. He had been speeding through the infinite just moments ago and here he was trapped on a tiny speck of dust.

But which speck of dust?

He looked around and was staggered by a flood of sensations: a flood of light that ushered in a wash of colour, a roar of noise, a pool of smells, a rush of tingly picks of pressure and pain all around him. All of these sensations, but nothing to concentrate or embody them. The connections seemed random and fast, one after the other: a flash of grey-blue, a slap of cold, an ear-splitting crash, the scent of rotting leaves, a blast of heat, the rough edge of an immense rock formation.

He tried to tie together the disparate impressions, but they wouldn’t stay in place. He tried to follow one of them—the feeling of heat—concentrating solely on it, until exhaustion stole it from him. He was being stretched. He quit grasping for the heat and felt a bright green take its place.

He let the sights, sounds, feelings, smells flash through him. He was losing himself. Desperate, he clung to something of his own, not something he was experiencing, but something of his past, of him. He thought of a song his mother used to sing to him when he couldn’t sleep, the last time he truly felt safe and loved.

Robin-a-Bobbin

Let fly an arrow;

Aimed at a rabbit,

Killed him a sparrow.

Robin-a-Bobbin

Bent back his bow;

Shot at a pigeon,

But killed a crow.

Robin-a-Bobbin

Let loose another;

Over his chimney,

Striking his brother.

Robin-a-Bobbin

Taken to town,

Wearing two bracelets

And fit for a gown.

Robin-a-Bobbin

No longer singing,

Come the next morning,

He will be swinging.

The effects of this were immediate and drastic. Everything came together. The light blue joined with a cool sensation of wind blowing over him, enveloping him like a crisp bedsheet. The sound of leaves rustling against each other. And white forms, clouds, came into sharp focus. Then greys, blues, and purples—a mountain of enormous size seen at a great distance. Blades of grass as sharp and defined as knife blades.

But that was all it was—just a scene, there was no
him
in it. He was just a disembodied cloud of perception. He could experience and observe but so far couldn’t interact. Although relieved that he was still able to do anything, he was still terrified at his condition.

And then he got another shock when he realised where he was. He was back in Elfland. The song he’d hummed, bringing
him back together, made sense now, at least. Poetry had power here.

The view was familiar—the mountain, the plain, the distant stretch of green forest—it was pretty much the same thing he had seen when he first arrived. He was standing, he presumed, on the same spot he had been transported to the first time, midway between the mountain and the forest.

He turned to look at the forest, but there was no “him” to turn. Instead, the tableau shifted to the side. Startled, he lost control of the centre of his perception and felt everything racing away from him again. He thought of the song and it all came back together—the sky, the mountain, all of it. He kept repeating the lines under his breath as he tried once again to turn.

He spun sharply and instantly, as fast as thought—completely out of control, but still coherent, at least. After the nausea had passed, he found the wood now before him, just as he remembered it, a line of trees along the horizon.

He sighed but expelled no breath. Now what? The lines of the song went around in his head
(Robin-a-Bobbin let fly an arrow . . . ).
He tried to move forward but only succeeded in making a sort of rocking motion, which he thought at first was movement, until he shifted his perception downward and saw that the grass underneath him was not going anywhere.

A thought occurred to him. He had made the landscape appear by focusing, so why not his body also? He tried to imagine his hand, imagine what it felt like to have a hand, imagined opening and closing it.

The world around him faded, dimmed, as if he were squinting his eyes. A shape appeared, like a shadow image coming into focus, and his hand coalesced out of the haze. It was like looking at some strange type of optical illusion. If he tried to leave off looking at the hand and follow his gaze down the palm, to the
wrist and forearm, the whole of it evaporated, so he concentrated just on the hand, and the more he did so, the more defined it was against the now dark background.

But it was heavy, solid, like it was cast in steel. He tried to close it into a fist, but only the barest twitch of the fingers was perceptible. After a long period of exhausting thought and concentration, he could do no more than turn it. Then he was able, after a time, to tilt it downward and brush the fingertips against the grass, which he could see moved, but which gave no sensation of touch.

He gave up his thoughts of his hand and tried instead to think of his feet. This felt more successful at first, and he was able to plant two feet firmly on the ground and experienced the feeling for the first time of being anchored to his environment, but that was it. He could not, for any desire or effort of will, make them move. He tried to visualise them moving, to feel what it was like to move them up and down. Nothing.

Exhausted, he gave up and concentrated just on
being
. Focusing on the song, which he repeated like a mantra in his head—his lifeline to sanity.

How was he going to get out of this now? How had he come here? Was he dead? He definitely wasn’t dreaming—everything felt hyper-real. Certain emotions or moods were often heightened during dreams and nightmares, but there was never such a flood of reality, however out of joint, such as he was experiencing now.

So he was dead. But killed by what? Perhaps shot or crushed by something unseen. That was a sad thought. What would happen to everyone he’d left behind? What was he going to do now?

The world around him had come back into bright focus again, out of the dim shades that concentration on his body brought. He gazed placidly at the treeline and remembered the first time he had made the journey across the endless plain.

The more he looked at it, the larger it grew, and for a moment
he thought that was because his “vision” was still clearing, but then he realised, with a thrill, that he was moving. The memory of having gone this way before was doing it.

He was flying now, the ground blurring beneath him. Although he couldn’t
feel
in the old, familiar sense, he was aware of a rushing wind going through him. He was starting to think of himself as a sort of cloud, a phantom.

He was going faster now, and just when he wondered how he was going to stop—if he even
could
stop, or if he would just fly through the woods, trunks, branches, and all—he was there at the treeline, and completely still. This is where he met Kay Marrey, the messenger from the Elves in Exile. He could almost see him standing before him. The Elves in Exile—that was a thought. Perhaps they could help him.

Then, with dawning awareness, he found that Kay was standing before him, but not as he had last seen him. Kay was draped in a blood-red robe, and his face was bone-white.

“What did I tell you not to do?” Kay asked.

Daniel made to reply but had no voice. And then the apparition was gone, leaving him puzzled and alone.

He stayed there for a time, pondering what he had just seen. Was it the ghost of Marrey that he’d summoned to him? Or was it a projection that he himself had made? Or an extension of this dream world, if it was a dream world?

Who could help him? He thought of Kæyle, the woodburner, and the clearing where he had lived for several months and suddenly, with a blur of green and black, the view shifted to that same place.

The scene was very much as he remembered it, but the burning pits were unused and overgrown, being neglected for some time.

“Daniel?”

He turned, pushing against the instinct to move his body and instead concentrated on the image at his periphery.

Kæyle’s wife, Pettyl, was standing in the doorway of one of the small dirt huts. She was looking at the space that Daniel occupied. Again, he tried to speak but couldn’t. Instead, he thought the words at her.

What am I doing here?

At the same moment, Pettyl also asked, “What are you doing here?”

You can see me?

Pettyl stared at Daniel a moment longer and then said, “Why have you come back?”

Back?

The memory of standing on the cliff overlooking the elfish campsite made the scene shift again, and in an instant he was standing up there again. Except now it was in the daytime, and so slightly unfamiliar. The fantastic tents and booths were missing. Was it all still a hallucination, or could he actually be in Elfland? If it was all just in his head, then why was it so different than he remembered? Still, he clung to any small piece of evidence he might not be dead.

He saw a black form on the field below him, where the grand elfish bazaar had once stood. As he watched, it separated into three equal-sized forms and moved apart from itself. They were human—actually elfish, Daniel corrected himself—shapes. Although distant, they looked in his direction, and he had the impression they’d been expecting him.

He took a step forward and then realised with a shock that he actually
had
taken a step forward.

“Oh, thank God!” Daniel’s breath rushed out of him in a grateful, disbelieving breath. He dropped to his knees and spent a few moments running his hands up and down his body, feeling his face, wiping away tears of relief. He was dressed in the clothes he had been wearing back in the tunnels—his sort of modified armour and survival gear.

The black shapes approached him. He rose and started toward them as well, delighting in each step he took, but gradually becoming more fearful as they neared.

As emotionally tumultuous as the past hours had been, it paled in comparison to the tidal wave of fear he experienced as he recognised the bloodless faces. Daniel did not know the first; his bloodless face was finely chiselled and regal, even for an elf. He wore a trailing cloak that indicated an imperious dignity and funereal solemnity.

It was the other face that drew Daniel up short. Agrid Fiall, the shady financier he had assassinated in order to leave this place the first time around. His bloodless face was screwed up in a wrathful sneer, and it looked as if he would spit poison daggers if he could.

The third form was in the shape of Felix Stowe—the elf who had imprisoned Freya, and whom he had killed.

“Oh man,” Daniel murmured. “I really am dead.”

^{_____________________}
V
^{_____________________}

Alex was in a bit of a bind, and he frantically searched his memory.

“Uh . . .
réveillez-vous, chevaliers dormant, et . . . et . . . um, bataille avec l’Anglais.
No, sorry, I mean, uh,
l’Angleterre.
That is—hold on,
bataille pour l’Angleterre . . . POUR l’Angleterre.”

Seven bearded, ancient French faces stared back at him blankly. They were in a sleeping chamber that was not adjoined to any tunnels. They’d had to resurface in the French countryside and follow some ancient markers to a burial ground near a place called Carnac. It wasn’t the cold, dry environment they had come to expect, but warm, slightly damp, and earthy. They had left the others at the cave exit—they were far too conspicuous to be travelling aboveground.

They had found the chamber, entered it, and Alex, excited to see a full chamber of slumbering knights, went to the horn that was hanging on the wall and blew it.

“Prys difuna yw?”
the nearest knight asked.

“Vous . . . parlez pas Français?”

“Pytra?”

Ecgbryt leaned in toward Alex. “How goes it?” he asked.

“I don’t think they speak French.”

“There may be an enchanted archway around here.”

“What sort of—?”

The knights shifted forward on their stone biers and moved their hands to their weapons. That was a very bad sign.

Alex and Ecgbryt took a step back. “We shouldn’t have left the others behind,” Alex said, his hand on his sword’s hilt.

“Pace,”
Ecgbryt said.
“Liss, freed . . .”