The Hero King (34 page)

They had questions. I was the only one who might have answers.

I went to my seat at the head table. People stood, and sat when I gestured them down. Kardeen sat next to me. Lesh and Timon stood behind us. Pages brought beer and bowls of pretzels.

“I know you’ve all been frightened,” I said. “I have been too, for ages and ages. Nothing like this has happened in thousands of years.” I paused. “But it
has
happened before, more than once, perhaps many times, and people have survived.” A brand-new thought hit me then, and I had to wait for it to run a couple of laps around my mind before I said anything about it.

“In fact, the last time this happened, the new world was a lot better, in the mortal realm for certain, and almost certainly here as well.” A lot of the people in the great hall were from the other world. “It marks the sudden leap from the late Stone Age to the early civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia.” It was a beautiful theory that made so much sense to me that I didn’t doubt it in the least: the sudden appearance of written language, widespread settled cultures, pharaonic Egypt.

“We can’t be sure yet what will result this time, but I’m as confident as I can be that the gray outside won’t be eternal.
Something
will return. We have to wait for it, as patiently as we can. After all, we’re not going to run out of food or anything else anytime soon.”

There wasn’t much more I could say, so I didn’t try. Someone else could pass along the details of my journey north … and beyond. I hoped that folks would exercise a certain amount of discretion in that.

    “Will there really be a new world?” Joy asked when I got back to her.

“I believe so,” I said. “Apparently, this kind of situation has happened a number of times in the past. Xayber said that he had gone through several of these cycles, and the Great Earth Mother confirmed that there had been many.” I was reluctant to go into any real detail about my time in the temple of the Great Earth Mother with Joy, even about the talk that had preceded our session in bed. Under the circumstances, I had no reason to feel guilty about that. With the entire universe
in extremis
, what I had done could hardly be considered infidelity. Still, I couldn’t entirely suppress an uneasiness. I would have been extremely uncomfortable giving Joy a blow-by-blow account. I would have if she had demanded it, but she didn’t.

We got undressed and into bed. Joy had me feel the baby’s kicking, a startling sensation the first several times. We lay together, holding on, for a long time, but there was no question of sex, not when I was afraid that Joy might pick about any second to shoot our first child into the world—or whatever it was out there beyond the castle walls.

Joy had less trouble getting to sleep than I did. Her soft breathing lulled me to the edge of sleep, but I needed forever to tip across that edge. I remember thinking, I
hope
this
part isn’t just a dream
, and then there was that inner void finally ready to claim me.

    When I woke feeling that it must be time for morning, I decided that I had better find Parthet as soon as possible. Joy slept on. I dressed and went around to ask somebody where the old wizard had been sleeping lately. The room above his workroom had been turned over to Aaron, and so had the workroom. According to Lesh, Parthet had announced, loudly and often during my absence, that he was retired, that Aaron was now the wizard of Varay. I learned that Parthet had claimed a small tower room that gave him fairly direct access to the kitchen and great hall. He was in the kitchen when I started through there for the tower stairs.

“I don’t sleep much anymore,” Parthet said, greeting me with an answer to a question I hadn’t even thought of asking.

“I think we need to have a talk,” I said.

He smiled over a mug of coffee. “I expect we do,” he said. “I know what I look like.”

“Like Grandfather did, except you’re trying to tell me that you haven’t been sick.”

“I haven’t been sick, and I’m not sick now. But …” He looked around. “This isn’t the place for our talk. I think they’re about ready to start toting your breakfast upstairs. We could talk up in your dining room. As homey as this kitchen is, perhaps this particular conversation deserves a different setting, and fewer ears to listen.”

Once we got out in the corridors, away from other eyes, Parthet only made a
pro forma
protest against the support I offered him. I brushed aside the protest and held his arm while we walked, supporting as much of his remaining weight as I could.

“You talk as though you’ve made all your preparations for death,” I said when we stopped to let him rest for a moment halfway up the stairs.

“Most of them,” he conceded easily. “There’s not much left to do.” He started walking again, and I couldn’t get anything else from him until we were seated at the table in the private dining room upstairs.

“I’m part of Vara’s world, Vara’s universe,” Parthet said when he was settled in a chair. “It seems that I am—or was, to be more accurate—an integral part of it. Perhaps you’ll understand that better if you get a chance to read the book of memories you forced me to write.”

“It was your idea, not mine,” I reminded him. “But I’ll read it, never fear.” And then, for the first time in ages, I thought of my grandmother’s
Tower Chapbook
. Mother had left that for me with the note that brought me to Varay. Over the years, I had glanced at it a few times, read a few short sections, but I hadn’t really sat down and thoroughly
read
it yet. “I’ll read it,” I told Parthet again, but I was talking about both books.

“When you forced the memories back, you forced the memoir,” Parthet said. He snorted. “Vara’s world. And now, that world is passing, almost dead. Your world is a-borning. When the transition is complete, I will be gone.”

“That sounds rather melodramatic, Uncle,” I said.

“Perhaps, but true. It’s not an old man’s fancy. You can see yourself what has become of me. There is no chance for me to see the world you’ve made. I
would
like to see it, at least enough of it to judge how well you did.” A wan smile. “A ripping good show, I’m sure.”

“Can’t Aaron do something to help you?”

“Not a thing, no more than he could help Pregel. The lad will do you proud, Gil. He’s a better wizard than I ever was—tenfold, maybe a hundredfold. He’ll serve you and your children and their children for ages to come.”

“I’d as soon have you around longer, bad eyes, dirty jokes, and all.”

“I thank you for that, but there simply is no way. Call it a natural law, one I’ve only recently discovered.”

He was as serious as he could be. I could tell that from the sound of his voice and the look on his face. And I never even considered that it might just be a case of an old man talking himself into a delusion. Not Uncle Parthet. And he didn’t simply
think
that he was going to die soon, he was positive, he
knew
it.

“There’s no precedent for a wizard dying here, no tradition,” I said. There was another smile to go with his shrug. “It leaves a big question. We have places for kings and we have places for Heroes in the crypt. Where do you fit?” That lack was one of the clues that had led me to guess how far back Parthet’s past went.

“I’m afraid you leaped to the right conclusion through the wrong hoop, lad,” Parthet said, smiling again. He let me stew in that for a moment before he continued.

“I’m afraid that there won’t be any remains for you to visit, so you don’t have to worry about their disposition. Look at me! If there was a bright sun behind me, you could see straight through me now.” He said that almost harshly, then softened his tone. “If you’d been around as long as I have, there wouldn’t be much left of you either, lad. I’ll simply fade away, leaving only memories in the minds of others. And in time, even those will fade. In a few generations, people here will never remember that Varay ever had a wizard besides Aaron, and in a lot more generations, if he lasts as well as I think he will, even he may come to believe it.”

“Aaron. What’s going on between him and Annick?”

“They share a bed, if that’s what you mean.”

“Only partly. The jailer and his prisoner?”

“No, no,” Parthet said. “This all began almost immediately after you left, after Xayber acknowledged Annick as his granddaughter. She already had her hatred for all things of Fairy, and then to learn that her father was the son of the Elflord of Xayber, the primary focus of her hatred …” Parthet shook his head. “The snow-white skin of Fairy. And there stood Aaron, the antithesis, his skin as black as an elf’s is white.”

“That sounds suspiciously like a racist remark, Uncle, if you know what I mean by that.”

“Racial perhaps, but not necessarily racist. There
is
a difference. Isn’t ‘opposites attract’ a properly senile adage in the world of your birth? But relationships grow sometimes. You’ll simply have to watch and decide for yourself.”

I felt that there was something missing in the distinction that Parthet was trying to draw, but he didn’t give me a chance to think it through.

“There’s something more important that you should be thinking about,” he said.

“Such as?”

“Such as your relationship to the world that’s about to be born.”

“What do you mean?”

“Now, it wouldn’t be the same if I gave you the answer, would it? Think about it, lad. That’s the action that’s important.”

    Even without Parthet’s cryptic advice, I would probably have found my way down to the catacombs under Castle Basil that day. I had a habit of going down there when anything was bothering me, and after my return from the Great Earth Mother, a catalog of the things that were bothering me would have been approximately the size of the combined Chicago telephone books. And I just had to see for myself that the crypt far down in the center of Basil Rock was still there.

It was.

The room was the same as before. There were no changes along the burial wall. There had been no Laza-ruses in Castle Basil.

I paced back and forth the entire width of the burial wall, from Pregel to my father, stopping occasionally in the center, in front of Vara. I kept my curses silent, but they came, regularly. I related my adventures again, all the way though, just talking, listening to the echoes. This time I went into more detail than I had to my living audience upstairs. Motor mouth. Maybe I was still trying to convince myself that it had all really happened the way I remembered it … or maybe I was trying to convince myself that none of it had happened at all.

When I ran out of things to say about my adventures from Fairy to the inner temple of the Great Earth Mother, I found myself thinking about what Parthet had said I should be thinking about—my relationship to the new world.
He
had no doubt that a new world was coming, and I was glad to have all the reassurance I could find. But
relationship?

I thought about the crazy time while I was supposedly falling into and through the Great Earth Mother. That had to have been insanity, a hallucination, or a metaphor. So I performed a ritual of some sort that might permit a new world to follow the old. Maybe there was something like LSD in the food or wine that I had before we headed to that bedroom. The idea that my session with the Great Earth Mother would make the new universe my literal descendant, in the same sense that the baby Joy was about to have would be, was ludicrous. All of the mental raving, the images of DNA molecules, egg universes, and such had to be part of that coital craziness.

It had to be.

My world? No way. That would make me …

    Aaron and Annick found me in the crypt, just as I was getting ready to start the long climb back to the living levels of the castle.

“I figured you’d be here,” Aaron said.

I nodded, looking first at him and then at Annick. She was the major surprise. For the first time since I met her, years back in Battle Forest, there was no tension in her face. She hadn’t turned into a bubbling airhead or anything like that, but she wasn’t instantly marked with the stigma of her hate.

“You look almost happy,” I told her. She actually smiled, but there was also a sudden edge to the grin, a cutting edge that told me that the hatred was still there, only held at bay for the moment.

“There’s nothing left of Fairy now, is there?” she asked. Challenged.

“I think not,” I said.

“Once you asked me what I would do when all those I hated were gone. I told you I would find something. I did.”

I looked at Aaron.

“It’s not just this,” he said, holding his black hand next to her white face. It wasn’t the first time that Aaron had almost seemed to know what I was thinking. “Not even mainly this.” The trace of reservation I heard in his voice didn’t seem to be about what he said, but—I think—about how I might react. Aaron had changed while I was gone. Perhaps it was just maturation. Or perhaps he expected disapproval, or even jealousy, from me.

“Are you sure?” I included them both in the question, tried to make it sound friendly, hopeful. Some languages have devices for those situations, constructions that say that you expect or hope for a positive answer.

“It’s not even this,” Annick said, tracing the white blaze on the left side of Aaron’s face—the only remains of Annick’s father.

Annick took Aaron’s hand then, and I reached out to clasp their hands in mine. “As long as you’re both certain,” I said.

“This is going to sound silly as hell coming from me,” Aaron said with an embarrassed grin, “but it’s magic.”

    After my ride through the gray limbo and the way that limbo continued to envelop Castle Basil, I was getting used to the nonchalant mood of time in this new environment. The gray nothingness persisted, leaving time to mark itself slowly, however it wanted to, for perhaps a week after I returned.

When things finally started happening, they all seemed to happen at once as time tried to catch up with itself. I don’t mean that things just
seemed
to happen one right after the other, or simply coincidentally close. I mean that everything
did
happen precisely at once, which makes it especially difficult to chronicle coherently.