The Hero King (25 page)

My swords were hungrier, and faster. They took off two lovely heads quickly, then bit into more beautiful flesh before Electrum beat a hole through the center of the line. It’s a good thing there were no newspapers or electronic media around, even better that the Great Earth Mother didn’t have one of the many students of Dr. Goebbels on the payroll. I could see the headlines on the tabloids: M
AD
S
LASHER
G
OES
O
N
R
AMPAGE
D
URING
G
IRLS’
S
CHOOL
O
UTING
. The reality was jarring enough.

The fight took only a few seconds, but I didn’t get away scot-free. By the time the last of the women fell wounded or dropped behind, I had dozens of deep scratches. Some of the women had claws that would do a Bengal tiger proud. One even slashed through the thick leather that cushioned my chain mail.

The thorns that encroached on the path didn’t seem nearly so bad as I raced to escape the horny and hungry vixens. I kept looking back to see if any of the women had managed to hitch a ride on Geezer or if they were following me. My vision got blurred, and it took me a moment to realize that it was because I was crying. And it took even longer for me to discover that all those naked women had done more than just arouse me. They had pulled the trigger as well.

    I still hadn’t fully recovered my breath or my poise from that incident—I was still pounding along, and so was my heart—when Wrigley Field dropped out of the sky, the lights flashing on and off, flags showing a wind blowing out toward right field. Wrigley Field, home of the Cubs. Wouldn’t you know it: they finally put in lights for night baseball and just about the time people are beginning to forget that they weren’t always there, World War Three erupts. In a way, that figured. The same thing might have happened if they had won a World Series.

But it was only the stadium that dropped, not the playing field itself. That would have put an early end to my quest. I was crossing where second base should have been, heading in the direction of the visitors’ bullpen. The force of the crash when the stadium hit the forest split the stands and I was able to ride straight through, though not with the aplomb that a Hero might be expected to show. Geezer needed some calming, but Electrum was rock-solid. He had faced dragons and didn’t know anything about baseball.

Once we cleared the cracked stadium, we continued to follow the path through the thorny trees. Wrigley Field really gave me something to think about. First off, there was the matter of how it got out of Chicago intact through a nuclear war. Secondly, how did anyone know to drop
that
particular stadium on my head? I adjusted my Cubs cap and looked back. Evidently the Great Earth Mother was very big on “Know your enemy.” That didn’t, as they say, bode well for my mission.

There were no more challenges through that day, but after the Amazons and Wrigley Field, I was so nervous that I feared new disasters at every turn. I was so hyper by sunset that a simple “Boo!” behind me would have launched me at least as far as geostationary orbit.

We stopped so I could cook my supper. I got a fire going that was much larger than I needed, too large for the prudent outdoorsman in a tinder-dry forest. I chopped down several small trees and hacked the thorny branches into small lengths with Dragon’s Death, using up some of the adrenaline that had been pumping through my veins all day. I cooked up four of my ready-to-barf dinner packets and ate them. Then we rode on, away from the ashes of the campfire. Warmth would be nice during the night, but after that day’s adventures, I had no intention of camping next to a beacon. There might still be a few of those hungry houris on my trail.

Two hours later, I finally made camp. But I didn’t sleep much. Between reliving my confrontation with the voracious lovelies (and only the most exaggerated of them hadn’t done much for my innate lust) and wondering what was coming next, sleep didn’t seem to be the best idea in the world, not in that crazy forest where a threat could drop on me before I could even see it. I wasn’t ready to put full faith in the danger sense that a Hero of Varay has instilled along with his initiation. It had never stopped me from posting a guard at night when there were several of us along on a mission.

The night was freezing. I sat in my tent with my blankets wrapped around me. I was still cold, especially my nose—which ran continuously except when it felt as if it were about to fall off. I thought a lot of cold thoughts in the night. I had to keep heading north, no matter how far—like Dr. Frankenstein pursuing his monster across the icefields. I was equipped for quite a bit of cold, but not for a polar winter. Thermal underwear and a fleece-lined parka will take you only so far. I wondered how cold it would get before I reached the central temple of the Great Earth Mother—where it would likely get much too hot for comfort. I worried about frostbite—even though it wasn’t really
that
cold yet—and I remembered a Jack London story about a man freezing to death and getting so deliciously warm just before the end. And I managed to think about how ironic it would be if I reached the Great Earth Mother, got her in the proper mood for what had to be done, then found that the important bits had been frostbitten and wouldn’t work. The Hero, unable to rise to his final challenge. I didn’t laugh.

Five moons passed overhead, or rather, somewhat to the south, one after the other, getting closer to the full.

By morning, I was shaking with the cold, miserable, and just about soured on the whole business. The only problem was that there was no alternative to pressing on to the bitter end—and I couldn’t have been more convinced that the end would be bitter, from the cold, if nothing else.

    A little before noon, my fourteenth day out from the estate of the Elflord of Xayber, the scraggly little thorn jungle came to an end the same way it had started, bounded by a puny trickle of water. I was anxious to get away from the arthritic thorn trees, but I still reined in Electrum to sit and look out at the new vista before we crossed the creek.

Solid trees south of the water; not a tree in sight north of it … very little of
anything
, actually. The plain was barren to the horizon around half of the compass. Only a little thin grass grew in the sandy, or gravelly, soil. It looked as though it would crunch underfoot. “Miles and miles of miles and miles,” came to mind. I had no idea where I first came across that phrase. I still don’t.

“Well, Geezer, I hope you feel up to carrying an extra load for a while. I think we’re going to have to carry enough wood for our next few campfires with us.”

Geezer didn’t answer, which was just as well. A talking horse wouldn’t have helped my nerves a bit. Geezer’s load had been getting gradually lighter as we traveled. Each meal I ate lightened his burden a bit. I got busy and chopped down a bunch of little thorn trees. I had been wearing lined gloves and my parka against the cold, but chopping wood warmed me enough to do without them for quite a while. I built a fire and heated a couple of meal packs for lunch, then got busy baling wood to take along. I had no way to know how far the next suitable fuel might be, so I kept going until Geezer was carrying as much as he could handle.

The horses grazed and drank while I worked and ate. They were both ready to move on by the time I was.

Riding across a flat, barren plain did offer one nice bonus that made up for a lot of shortcomings. I would see any approaching threat with plenty of time to plan a response … unless it materialized right on top of me, of course. The reverse was also true. Any threat would see me with a lot of warning, but I didn’t consider that to be much of a flaw. The only threats I anticipated would come from the Great Earth Mother, and I was already certain that she knew just where to find me.

The only outside threat, unconnected with my present mission, that is, might be a dragon, and no dragons had been spotted (at least not over Varay) since the herd of them rained out of the sky when I scarfed down the balls of the Great Earth Mother. Dragons. I wished that there were dragons around that people could ride, something straight out of Pern. That would have taken much of the drudgery out of the Hero work.

I took a compass bearing when we crossed the creek. Without reference points, I expected to consult the compass quite often, but at least I wouldn’t have to worry about the vagaries of a twisting forest path out on the empty plain. I could aim north, hold the heading without any trouble, and be able to make much better time.

That’s what I
thought
, anyway.

About a half hour after we started on the plain (and yes, the rough soil did crunch underfoot), I looked back to get some perspective on our progress. That damn forest looked like it was no more than a couple of football fields away, and that was ridiculous. We had been riding at a brisk walk the whole time.

“Optical illusion,” I muttered, and I started us north again, maybe at a trot for a few minutes now and then.

The next time I looked back, we might have been a quarter mile from the forest, still nowhere near as far off as we should have been.

“I think something’s wrong,” I said, having sudden flashbacks to my first nightmare visit to the Congregation of Heroes. In that, I had climbed the stairs from the crypt up to the living levels of Castle Basil without making anywhere near the progress I should have.

And in the Titan Mountains, the maze guarding the first shrine had refused to get any closer as we walked toward it, until I closed my eyes and damn near walked into a wall.

I got down off of Electrum and looked around, then knelt to grab a handful of the gravel and sand. It felt normal. I’ve been on beaches with that kind of mixture, up above the high-water line. I held out my arms, aimed back at the forest, and sighted past my thumb, the way you see artists doing it—at least on TV and in the movies. I held my thumb so it covered one tree. After a couple of minutes, the edges of the tree started to appear from behind my thumb.

That really wasn’t what I expected.

“The ground’s sliding back toward the forest,” I announced. Well,
sometimes
Electrum almost seemed to know what I was saying.

We had made some progress away from the forest while we were moving, but every minute we stayed in one place, we lost ground because the ground was moving south. A slow treadmill. We had to move north faster than it moved south to get anywhere.

I mounted Electrum again and pushed it—canter, trot, walk, canter. I kept the horses going as fast as I dared, using the walk sparingly, as a rest, trying to keep Electrum and Geezer speeding along as much as possible. We did make noticeable progress, but there was no sign of any relief to the north, no promise of any end to the treadmill. The motion of the ground wasn’t pronounced enough to feel, but in a ten-minute break, we might lose close to a hundred yards. We didn’t take many breaks. And I refused to even think of stopping for longer than ten minutes until we got clear of the mess. A good supper and a night’s sleep might put us all the way back at the forest, and I couldn’t bear to think of wasting an entire day and facing the same challenge the next morning.

The day seemed longer than it had any right to be, especially so far north at that time of year. November. So far north? Latitude isn’t really the same in Fairy and the buffer zone as it is back in the other world. It’s not like saying you cross from Canada into the buffer zone and then Fairy in the far north, nothing like that. The climate in Varay is beautiful. Winters are short and mild, the summers don’t get extremely hot. It’s really too ideal for anywhere in the “real” world, though there are certainly enough tourist boards and chambers of commerce that claim that sort of climate. There is
some
relationship between distance north and weather in the buffer zone and beyond, just not as much as back home. I hoped that the general rule continued to hold in the lands north of Fairy. Each increasingly cold night cooled my optimism, though.

We rode. Every so often, I looked at my compass and made sure that we were still heading due north. If the ground could slide south under us, it might also be able to get us turned around. More often, I looked back over my shoulder. At a very rough estimate, we were sliding two steps back for every three we took forward. The entire day passed like that. I didn’t stop for meals, didn’t stop for anything but the most essential of personal needs and to rest the horses for a few minutes when I feared that they couldn’t go on without a stop.

I watched five moons come up, one by one, getting near the full. We kept riding. Our pace fell off, but I figured that we were still managing a
little
forward progress. But even if we had been doing nothing but staying in place, we had to keep moving, keep trying, to keep from losing ground.

It was a long night after a long day. At times I got down and walked to give Electrum a little relief. I thought about discarding some of Geezer’s burdens, dumping some of the wood I had packed up, but that seemed too desperate a measure to take yet. There might be weeks left to travel, and the items I might dump now could be the ones that would make the vital difference later, whether I abandoned wood or anything else.

The moons crossed the sky and started to set. I was so exhausted that I could hardly keep my eyes open even when I was on the ground walking in front of my horses. A few more hours of this treadmill and all the determination in the world wouldn’t be enough to keep us going even fast enough to stay in place. It would be so much easier to camp, to promise myself that it would only be for an hour, just long enough to get a little real sleep and to rest the horses. But that kind of promise is too easy to break. One hour becomes two. Two becomes four, and four hours might easily cost us every inch we had gained in a long day and night of effort.

We kept trudging north, into the brief interlude of dark following the setting of the fifth moon and the start of dawn.

I stumbled and fell flat on my face. I felt
movement
under my chest. I slid my hands around.
The edge!
The gritting sand seemed to be coming out from under something. The ground beyond was stationary, as far as I could tell. The spot where I fell was like the start of an escalator, where the steps come out from under a platform.