The Hero of Varay (21 page)

“It means a lot of bloody fighting,” I said.

“Everyone seems to think that it will pass.”

“Then you’d better be damn sure you get your family moved through as quickly as you can Saturday. Don’t dally in Chicago.”

“I won’t. Oh, I cleaned the supermarket out of Hershey Bars and Milky Ways too.”

“They’ll come in handy. Chocolate’s good for quick energy.” I was quick to decide that we’d have to sneak some of the candy bars out for our trip.

“Powdered hot chocolate mix, a bunch of canned food, today’s newspapers—
USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Louisville Times, New York Times
. This week’s news magazines, and I don’t know what-all else. Some clothes, shampoo, personal things.” She hesitated a minute. “Gil, I think I spent more than two thousand dollars.”

“Is that all? The way you kept listing stuff, I figured it would be more than that. But I didn’t know I could get that much out on my bank card in one day.”

“You can’t. You had about six hundred in your wallet and there was a little over a thousand in cash in that lock box you brought over from Chicago, and I had some cash of my own.”

“Don’t worry about it. Money’s no problem. I told you that. You could have taken the credit cards too.”

“I didn’t think about it or I would have,” Joy admitted with a smile.

Timon and I brought the last of the loot through, and Joy let the doorway close. We kissed and then she started digging through all the stuff to show me what she had bought.

“We can look at it all later,” I told her. “It’s supper-time.”

“Oh, I got a bunch of those big square batteries for the lanterns too. You said batteries wear out fast.”

“If you want your Pepsi cold, you’ll have to coax Parthet to come over and freeze a block of ice for you,” I said as we walked downstairs to eat.

“I didn’t think about ice,” she admitted.

“We’ve got a closet fixed up something like a shower stall, with a watertight door. Fill it with water and Parthet does his abracadabra bit and turns it into a solid chunk of ice. Chip off what you need either to put in a glass or to chill bottles in one of the coolers. Takes about ten days for the ice in the closet to melt and drain away.”

    Joy kept talking all through supper, but she still managed to wolf down her share of everything. “Shopping makes me hungry,” she said, as if living in Varay wasn’t excuse enough for eating as much at one meal as she used to eat in half a week. She hadn’t noticed the way everyone’s bellies puffed out and then deflated in the hour or two after a meal—like recurrent, transient beer guts. When she first saw herself that way, she was likely to panic. Joy put a lot of stock in her trim figure. So did I, for that matter, but I knew just how ephemeral the bloated stomachs were in the buffer zone.

I couldn’t see how Joy had managed to buy everything she did and get it transferred to Varay in one afternoon. Timon said that they had filled the van twice, and they must have really packed every cubic inch both times. Of course, most stores would have help to get the purchases out to the van, but Timon and Joy would have had to unload the van at Mother’s house, carry everything to the doorway leading to Cayenne from there, and then do it all again. Timon had already hauled through quite a lot before Lesh and I got back from Basil. There were ten full cases of Pepsi beside the two cases of beer and everything else Joy bought.

No wonder she was so hungry.

But the way Joy carried on at the table solved one problem. I had to talk with Lesh, Harkane, and Timon about our quest, and I didn’t want to do that with Joy around, and questions would have been asked during supper if Joy hadn’t monopolized the conversation. I also had to leave instructions for the people who were staying behind to make sure that things went as smoothly as possible for Joy. She had even thought to buy small gifts for all of the people who worked at the castle—nothing extravagant, but enough to let everyone know that she had thought about him or her. It’s not the kind of thing I ever remembered to do. She must have pumped Timon for a lot of information, because she knew just who we had and how many children they had over in the village, and just about everything else about them.

I was impressed, and then some. Joy was going to make a very popular chatelaine at Castle Cayenne.

There was even a special treat for dessert, ten gallons of ice cream that Joy had brought back in a couple of new camping coolers. It was enough to give everyone in the castle a good taste with enough left over for the people with children in the village to take some home with them.

It was a jolly party, almost enough to make me forget what the morning held in store.

But then Mother joined us, just as the party was breaking up.

“Why didn’t you tell me that there’s a dragon flying in our world?” she asked.

“I haven’t seen you since then.” I turned to Joy. “Did you hear any more about it this afternoon?” She shook her head.

“Why is it so important?” I asked Mother. “I mean, beside the obvious evidence of how screwed up everything is getting.”

“There are Varayans in that world.”

“I know about Doc McCreary.”

“He’s not the only one. There are”—she made a quick, impatient gesture with both hands—“nearly two dozen Varayans, and their families, some from here, some from there. This dragon will have them in a panic.”

“More than the
Coral Lady?”

“Yes, especially just after that.”

“You think some of them will want to come back here?”

“It’s likely. I’ll have to go home and call each of them, find out. I’m their only contact.”

“Be careful.”

“I’m aware of the danger,” Mother said, coolly. Our relationship remained rather touchy. I make no apology for that. But we tried to keep it from completely destroying the family ties. It took work on both sides.

“Grandfather is still in danger,” Mother said, changing subjects abruptly. “Frankly, I don’t see how he has lasted this long.”

“I told him that I’m not ready to take over his job,” I said, softly enough that almost anyone but Mother might have missed it.
She
could hear a whisper through a chorus of air hammers.

“You can’t carry him forever like that,” she said. That started something ticking inside me. Mother actually believed that I had the power to affect Pregel, to hold off death. That she believed it was frightening. That she might be right was even more terrifying.

    Mother was in a hurry to get to Louisville so she could do her Paul Revere bit on the telephone. Joy went upstairs to put some order to all the things she had bought. That gave me a chance to talk with all of the castle people and with my three traveling companions. I needed more than an hour to make sure that everyone knew what I wanted them to know in advance. The four of us who were going on the road would pop through to Basil at dawn and have our breakfast there. I gave Lesh, Harkane, and Timon a full briefing on what we had to do, where we had to go, what was at stake, and who our guide would be. Carrying along the talking head of a dead elf was the only thing that visibly bothered anyone. It bothered me too, but the elf was our only ticket.

When I got upstairs, Joy was still working at her sorting, putting the different items in separate stacks, but she had changed clothes. She was just wearing a bathrobe, loosely belted now.

“The bath water’s just barely warm, but if you hurry you might get enough,” she said.

I nodded and went on through to the bathroom. She was right about the water temperature, but it was often worse. Since Joy had braved it, I wasn’t going to cheat by going to Chicago for a shower. I didn’t want to give Joy the slightest excuse for thinking that Chicago and its world might be safe, not while I was gone. At least the water wasn’t warm enough to let me sleep in the tub, and I might easily have fallen asleep in hot water. I was tired, and even more exhausted by the thought of the trek I had to start in the morning.

Why?
I had asked myself that question quite often, starting as soon as I saw that all the craziness was building up to what looked like a suicidal mission for me. Why was I willing to head off on this impossible quest? I could have taken Joy back to the world we grew up in. We could have found a secluded place—too out-of-the-way for terrorists, far enough from any major target to have a shot at surviving anything, even all-out nuclear war. We could forget about elflords and chickens that laid dragon eggs, and kids who literally grew up overnight. I had the training to be a top-notch survivalist if it came to that. And it would probably be safer than continuing as I was.

The first time I went tilting at windmills it was different. I started out trying to rescue my parents from some then-unknown difficulty, then I went on to avenge my father’s death, and other things got done along the way,
by
me and
to
me. I didn’t even know what the hell was going on until it dropped right on my head. In a way, that was really an advantage. This time I had a fairly good idea of what was in store.
The omens said that we were rapidly moving toward Armageddon or Götterdämmerung or Judgment Day or whatever; the End of Everything
. If you believed the advertising.

I wasn’t quite positive that I did, but the arguments were too strong to bet against them at house odds.

That still didn’t make my decision to attempt something even less likely against longer odds very logical or intelligent, but it did let me sleep nights. Annick once told me that I did what I did from a sense of duty. The word embarrassed me then, and I tried to shy away from it whenever I could, even in my thoughts. I guess I still do. It sounds too abstract, too impersonal. “Duty, honor, country”? Maybe, but maybe not. Maybe I
am
just stupid or crazy enough for this Hero business.

Or perhaps it all came from a sense of family. All the family I had left was in Varay—Joy, my mother, and her kin. Dad was an only child and so were both of his parents, and they were all dead. I had never known either set of grandparents. Mother’s parents were killed back in the early 1940s. Dad’s died about ten years later.

Whatever. There was a crazy, dangerous job to be done, the kind of Hero-work I had been raised and trained to do—even if it was by subterfuge and deception. My decision to try was never seriously at doubt.

I don’t claim that I was being smart.

    “Are you going to take all night in there?” Joy called from the bedroom. I guess that maybe I did come close to dozing off in the tub, lukewarm water and all.

“I’ll be out in a minute,” I said. I toweled off vigorously, and that perked me up a little.

Joy was already in bed, the covers pulled up to just below her breasts. Only a single lamp was burning, and it was low. Joy and I made love, but I can’t claim that it was my best performance ever, and afterward I did something I never do. I just rolled off and went straight to sleep. I simply couldn’t stay awake.

When I woke, much later, the night was at its most silent. The bedroom was dark, with only the faint glow of the clock’s luminous face and the moon-and starlight filtering in through the window. Joy was awake, her head on my shoulder, one hand down under the blankets caressing me, stroking, teasing. I turned toward her and we kissed.

“I hope you were dreaming about me,” Joy whispered in my ear. Her hand was still busy below.

“What are you talking about? I wasn’t dreaming.”

“You must have been. You got a big hard-on.”

“I don’t remember any dream, but if I had one, it must have been about you.”

“You’d better prove it.”

I managed to sneak a glance at the clock—it wasn’t quite four-thirty yet—and then I did what Joy wanted. Five and a half hours of sleep is plenty for me most nights. And I would like to think that I redeemed myself after the evening before, even though I knew that it might be the last chance we would ever have.

“How long will you be gone this time?” Joy asked after we finished.

“I don’t have any idea. I don’t know how far into the mountains we have to go, or how slow it will be. Several weeks at least.”

“You realize that if I knew how to ride a horse, I’d be going with you.”

“No!” Since Joy
didn’t
know how to ride, I could have avoided that, but I knew where silence or agreement would lead. The second part of the quest would be by boat. “I would never risk you like that, Joy,” I told her. “And I could never take a chance of getting in a position where I might have to choose between saving you and completing the mission. The penalty for failure might be too drastic—for everyone.”

“You let
her
go with you.” She was talking about Annick.

“Not exactly. And it wasn’t the same. The choice wouldn’t have been anywhere near as difficult.”

“You mean because she knew how to fight and kill?”

“No, because she wasn’t you and I never felt anything for her like I feel for you. Annick was driven by hate, and all she saw in me was that I hurt her enemies more than she had.”

When Joy started to ask another question, I stopped her with a kiss—a long, hard kiss. And then it was time to get up.

Dressing for the road is quite a procedure, and I can always count on sweating a lot out riding in the complete get-up. I had layers of clothing, part from one world, part from the other. I started with T-shirt and jockey shorts, the heaviest denim jeans I had, wool socks, and comfortable combat boots. For casual wear, that would have been more than enough for an August day that would probably get into the high eighties. But that was only the start for a proper Hero going a-questing to do Hero-work. The next layer was a padded leather tunic that reached down past my butt (split partway up the back so I could ride a horse in it) and laced up the front. The complete costume includes the Varayan equivalent of chaps to protect my legs, leather studded with six-inch strips of metal to keep a chance sword stroke from biting too deeply, but I never wore those. The chain mail to go over the leather had to wait until I had experienced help. Getting that on and fastened was a two-man job. Anyway, I didn’t want to start carrying that weight until we were ready to leave.