The Hero King (2 page)

“We should get back to Basil,” I said after I had finished a two-pound ham sandwich and a couple of quarts of beer. There was no great enthusiasm in my voice, even though Basil was just a way station between Arrowroot and Cayenne, and Joy.

Harkane refilled my mug.

Aaron nodded. He was too busy eating to waste time talking. He was on his second sandwich. He had done all the magic. He had to be famished.

“In a few minutes,” I mumbled, and then I started working on my third quart of brew.

“Was there a tidal wave after the
Coral Lady?”
Aaron asked quietly when his mouth was empty for a moment.

That caught my attention. It was the nuking of the cruise ship
Coral Lady
in Tampa Bay that had started the latest string of disasters. Both of Aaron’s parents had been on the ship.

“There was a tidal wave,” I said, just as quietly. “A bad one.”

“If one hits here, I want to see it,” Aaron said.

“Okay.” There wasn’t much else I could say. I certainly wasn’t going to carp about it being dangerous, not after the magics I had seen Aaron perform out in and around the Great Earth Mother’s shrine. Now, I’ve always been very fond of my Uncle Parthet, but he just wasn’t in the same class as Aaron when it came to wizardry, even if Aaron was the rookie and Parthet had been around for twelve hundred years or more. And it wasn’t just a matter of Parthet’s poor eyesight.

“I don’t know how soon it might hit, so we’d better get our seats pretty soon,” I said.

Aaron stood right up, and so did the rest of us. We went up to the battlements of the keep, even higher than the outer walls. I didn’t anticipate any danger there, and my danger sense didn’t kick up a fuss. Or maybe it was just overloaded like the rest of me after everything that had already happened.

The Mist. The Sea of Fairy. Mortals feared to travel out of sight of the shore. As far as anyone in the seven kingdoms was concerned, the Mist couldn’t be crossed by mortals, though ships out of Fairy occasionally made the crossing. I had seen one of the Mist’s dangers, a sea serpent two miles long. That was enough for me. A tsunami would be almost reassuring, make the Mist a trifle less mysterious.

We waited, but not idly. Lesh had carried a small keg of beer along and we all had brought our mugs. Lesh was the first member of my entourage when I arrived in Varay. He had earned his knighthood fighting at my side in Fairy and in the Battle of Thyme. Besides being a canny soldier with more than thirty years of experience, he had turned into an equally capable chamberlain since I had come into Castle Cayenne.

The wave, when it came, was less than I had imagined.

Two lines of heavy waves came in, several minutes apart. The second was larger. It actually splashed a little water over the curtain wall of Arrowroot—though not very much—and it washed halfway across the plaza that separates the castle from the town. Still, it wasn’t very spectacular.

“Okay, let’s get back to Basil,” I said when it became clear that we had seen the main event. It probably sounded like a sigh. I was feeling more lethargic than ever. At the moment, it was all I could do to lift my beer mug to my mouth again. None of the others seemed very anxious to move either.

I looked at Aaron, then at Lesh, Harkane, and Timon—a slow scan. Nobody was jumping up to leave.

“We
do
need to get moving,” I said. Aaron nodded slowly, but he didn’t get up. Neither did I. I did look down into my mug to see how much beer I had left. About half a mug. I lifted it for a drink. That seemed to start a chain reaction. It’s like yawning—one person starts and soon everybody’s doing it.

That was when the sentry yelled.

“Rider coming!” He pointed to the west.

It wasn’t much, but it was something. I stood to look.

“The wave must have caused trouble somewhere close,” Aaron said. It hadn’t been ten minutes since the second wave dribbled back into the sea. I nodded. It was the easy guess. It also pumped a little adrenaline back into my system. The lethargy receded.

“Let’s go down to the gate,” I said.

“It seems that the baron is curious as well,” Aaron said as we started down the steps to the courtyard. He pointed. Resler was already hurrying to the gate.

The rider’s horse was clomping across the wooden bridge when we reached Baron Resler.

“There’s a strange iron ship, lord,” the rider said, gasping for breath as if he had been doing the running instead of the horse. “It washed ashore, t’other side of Nerva.” Nerva was the nearest village along the coast, about three miles away.

“Was it flying a flag?” I asked. I remembered the reports in the other world of two ships being missing, a Greek freighter in the Aegean and a Russian frigate in the Indian Ocean.

“A red flag, with some design in the corner,” the rider said, looking to me and then back to Resler. Well, not everyone in Varay knew who I was.

“It figures,” I said, as much to myself as to anyone else. Then I cleared my throat and spoke a little louder. “It has to be the Russian ship, a
naval
ship—guns, rockets, who knows what all.” It wasn’t the fact that it was a
Russian
ship that bothered me. Any armed vessel would have been just as bad. The buffer zone would make any naval types edgy.

Resler looked to me. He didn’t speak immediately, but a furrow appeared in his forehead as he thought over what I had said. I didn’t jump into any fancy explanations. Perhaps Resler had never heard of Russia, but it seemed more likely that he had. The top people in the buffer zone had a fairly decent grasp of the main facts of the mortal realm. They had to.

“Trouble?” Resler asked finally.

I shrugged. “It could be.” I looked up at the rider. He had made no move to dismount yet. “Was there any sign of the crew?”

“There were a couple of people on deck,” he said. “I don’t know if anything was said. The magistrate sent me riding at once.” Every village and town in the kingdom had a magistrate if it didn’t have someone higher in the feudal scale. He would be the local government, the representative of the king, and so forth.

“How many men should I send?” Resler asked me.

“Let’s not go in
looking
for a fight,” I said. “We’ll go.” I made a vague gesture with my head to indicate my companions. “This is your territory up here, so perhaps you’d want to come along. A few men, just an escort perhaps?” I did what I could to avoid stepping on the baron’s privileged toes. It was a delicate point of etiquette, to be sure, since I clearly outranked Resler, but all the more essential because of that.

“Yes, Highness,” Resler said, nodding formally. He turned and yelled for horses to be saddled, then called for a half-dozen men to ride along.

“An iron ship?” he asked me softly while we waited for the work to be done.

“Steel,” I replied. “Maybe a crew of two or three hundred men.” I shrugged. “I’m just guessing on crew size. I don’t know how many men a Russian frigate carries, or exactly what kind of weapons they would have. They will undoubtedly be very frightened men, Baron.”

“Frightened men can be dangerous,” he observed.

“At least there’s little chance that their guns will work here,” I added. Guns did work occasionally in the buffer zone, but not often enough to depend on them. But then, I had never been in the position of hoping that guns wouldn’t work before.

2
Passages

We rode a mile and a half before I caught my first glimpse of the grounded ship. Part of the frigate’s superstructure was visible over a low coastal hill. There was no sound of naval guns being fired. I took that as a good sign.

“How big
is
that thing?” one of Resler’s soldiers asked.

“Not so big for a navy ship,” I said. “It can’t be more than a few hundred feet long.” Of course, even a frigate would be much larger than any vessel ever seen in the buffer zone. It might be more than ten times the length of
Beathe
, for example, and
Beathe
had been a fairly large boat for the Mist.

The soldier didn’t have anything else to say, not even something predictable like “It’s as big as a dragon.”

The village of Nerva wasn’t very large, about thirty stone houses. None of the cottages had sustained any serious damage from the waves, though it seemed apparent that the entire village had been awash. The fishing fleet was another story. Two of Nerva’s fishing boats had been washed ashore and damaged. There were already men looking them over to see if they could be repaired. For the families that depended on those boats, that was more important than the huge metal hulk that had also been grounded near the village.

And it had been
thoroughly
grounded. The frigate had apparently plowed directly ashore. More than half of the ship was up on the beach. It seemed to be listing only a few degrees to port. Two rope ladders hung from the deck, and uniformed men were already down on the beach, inspecting the hull of the ship, guarded by other uniformed men carrying submachine guns.

“Let me do the talking,” I told Baron Resler softly. “While those guns might not be very effective, there is a chance that they could get off a shot or two.” Resler nodded. After all, dealing with dangerous situations was my prerogative as Hero of Varay. “I don’t want to see any weapons moving,” I added, a bit louder, looking around so that everyone with us heard. “Let’s not give them any additional reasons to be nervous.”

I got a few grunts in acknowledgment. Resler’s men were all too transparently awed by the size of the frigate. My own people weren’t. Maybe Aaron was a little nervous at seeing his first ship since his parents were killed in the bombing of the
Coral Lady
, but he certainly wasn’t awed by its size or its presence in Varay. And Lesh, Timon, and Harkane had seen enough television to be aware of big ships.

“They’ll never get that boat back into the water,” Resler commented. I glanced at Aaron.

He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said softly. “If it becomes important, I’ll try.”

“In the meantime, can you cook up anything to make
certain
that their guns won’t work?” I asked.

He hesitated for a second, then nodded once, decisively, and started a soft chant.

By that time, the seamen on and below the grounded frigate knew that we were heading for them. I saw several people up on the deck point our way, and the men who had climbed down to inspect the damage were all looking at us, their inspection put aside for the moment. I reined in my horse thirty yards back and dismounted. The people with me also stopped, but only Timon dismounted. He took the reins of my horse.

I took a few more steps toward the ship.

“My name is Gil Tyner,” I said. “This is the village of Nerva in the kingdom of Varay.” Meanwhile, I had a fervent appreciation for the translation magic of the buffer zone running through my head. I would be able to understand them, and they would be able to understand me. One of the sailors, obviously an officer from his uniform, took a few steps in my direction. One of the submachine-gun-toting men accompanied him, moving a step or two to the side.

“I am Lieutenant Dimitry Astakhov of the
Kalmikov,”
the officer said. “What is this place?”

I repeated what I had said about that. “A full explanation of that is going to take some doing,” I added. “Perhaps it should wait until I can speak with your captain. In the meantime, is there anything we can do to help? Do you have casualties that need caring for?”

“We have some minor injuries,” the lieutenant conceded. “Our people are caring for them.” He stared at me for a moment then. “You are attired strangely,” he said then—a masterpiece of understatement.

I took a deep breath. “You must try to understand that you are no longer on the earth you are familiar with. I believe you were in the Indian Ocean?” I waited until he nodded. Then I pointed out to sea. “That is known as the Mist, sometimes as the Sea of Fairy. But, your captain?”

Lieutenant Astakhov seemed delighted to pass the buck to his boss. He led the way up one of the rope ladders, and I followed. The lieutenant hadn’t even tried to make a fuss about my swords. The captain of the
Kalmikov
was Commander Eugene Sekretov, a man who looked much too young to be in command of a ship. He had trouble speaking—not any kind of
physical
disability, he was just so frustrated by his situation that coherent speech was quite an effort. Bull Halsey would have had just as much trouble.

“This is going to be difficult for you to believe,” I said by way of preface, and then I jumped right into a ten-minute discourse on the buffer zone and its relation to the other realms, mortal and fairy. The captain’s frustration grew sentence by sentence. His face flushed a deeper red. It was obvious that he neither believed me nor had a better explanation.

“I can guess that your engines haven’t worked since your ship came to these waters, that none of your electronic communications gear works. You don’t have radio contact with anyone. Your radar and sonar don’t function. I’ve never tried to use a compass here, but I would guess that—at a minimum—it probably does not function as you would expect. I can also guess that none of your guns will fire—not your naval guns, not your pistols or the submachine guns your sailors have down on the beach. That is the nature of the place. If you haven’t already tried your weapons, please go ahead and do so now.”

The captain held his hand out toward Lieutenant Astakhov, and the lieutenant handed him his pistol. “There is a round in the chamber,” Astakhov said. The captain flipped off the safety and lifted the gun. I didn’t suggest that he aim it at me, but for an instant I thought he was going to. But finally, he walked over to the side of the bridge and fired it into the air.

At least he pulled the trigger. Several times. He went through all the procedures, jacked new rounds into the chamber, and so forth, and the pistol still refused to operate. Then I waited while he called men in and tried several other weapons. Finally, he gave orders to load and fire one of the deck guns—something along the order of a four-or five-inch job by the look of it. It didn’t work either, not in four tries.