The Hero of Varay (7 page)

Joy turned to stare at me, and past me, again. When I took my left hand from the silver tracing and my Chicago bedroom disappeared, she screamed.

    She screamed.

In the movies, the hero slaps the heroine’s face when she screams hysterically. She stops and after a dramatic pause for a close-up, she says, “Thanks, I needed that,” or something equally trite. Maybe real life was even like that once upon a time, but women’s lib and the modern horror of even minor violence on a personal scale have killed that kind of reaction. People get more upset if a man slaps a woman he knows than they do if he murders twenty or thirty strangers. In any case, I don’t think I could ever bring myself to hit Joy, certainly not for screaming in reasonable terror.

I shouted her name, then took her in my arms and held her tight—with almost crushing force. The scream stopped, but the blank look of horror remained. I shook her, very gently, just enough to get her attention.

“Joy, you’re safe here.” I spoke rather loudly to make sure that I was getting through. “I love you. I love you.” I didn’t know what else to say. I had never had to deal with hysterics before.

I started to get scared again myself. I had worried about Joy’s reaction to Varay from the beginning, but I had never dreamed that her reaction might be this extreme, that she would go hysterical or catatonic on me. I held on to her until her shaking slowed down, then led her to the bed, and we sat on the edge of it. Joy moved as if she were in a trance. I continued to hold her tight.

“This is Castle Cayenne, my home in the kingdom of Varay. That’s in a buffer zone between our world and Fairy,” I said, speaking slowly. All I could think to do was to tell her as much of the story as I could, in simple terms, and hope that some of it would penetrate the shock and start her back to an even keel. I thought that she would be able to cope very well, once she got used to the idea, if we could just get past this initial fright.

“Alice in Wonderland. The Wizard of Oz
. The idea shouldn’t be all that impossible to accept,” I said.

“We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto,” Joy misquoted dully. At least she was talking again.

There was a sudden pounding at the door, and Joy jumped just as Lesh swung the door open and charged in with his sword in his hand. He saw me, us, and stopped. He started backing toward the door at once.

“Sorry, lord,” he said, sheathing his blade. “We heard a scream. I didn’t know you were back.”

“It’s okay, Lesh. We just got here,” I said. I looked from him to Joy, then back. “You might fetch a bottle of the Bushmills, some water, and a couple of glasses.”

“Aye, lord.” Lesh backed the rest of the way to the door, half-bowing several times. “Are you feeling well now, lord?” he asked.

“Well enough,” I said, nodding. Lesh closed the door as he left. Joy stared at the door, then turned her head to look at me.

“Lesh?” she said.

“You’ve met him before,” I reminded her. “A couple of times. He was at the hospital, and before that, in Chicago, during Mardi Gras.”

“Am I going crazy or is this all a dream like
The Wizard of Oz?”

“Neither. You’re not going crazy and this isn’t a dream. This is all for real.”

Joy shuddered, then put her head on my shoulder for a moment. She was still trembling, but not as wildly as before.

“He kept calling you ‘lord,’” she said after a moment, and her voice was beginning to sound a little more normal as well.

I took a deep breath. “He calls me that because he knows it doesn’t bother me as much as being called ‘Your Highness.’”

“Gil, what’s going on?” Plaintive, still frightened, but not in the same way as before.

“The ‘lord’ is because I’m the Hero of Varay. Capital H. It’s a formal title. But my great-grandfather is the king, and I’m also his heir.”

She didn’t respond to that.

“I didn’t learn about any of this until my twenty-first birthday,” I said. I started to tell her about that, but I didn’t get very far before Lesh knocked at the door and brought in a tray with a bottle of Bushmills Irish whiskey, a pitcher of water, and two small crystal glasses filled with ice cubes. Lesh and Parthet must have brought a load of ice through from Louisville.

Lesh set the tray on the nightstand and left without speaking. I poured whiskey for both Joy and me. Joy was never much of a drinker. I had only seen her try hard liquor once, and she only rarely had a glass or two of wine with a meal. But she didn’t hesitate now, and she waved me off when I went to add water to her drink. She took the glass I handed her and poured most of the whiskey into her mouth. She coughed and gagged a little, then made a face, but it did seem to help her. She finished, handed the glass back to me, and said, “More.”

I refilled her glass, and topped mine off. I had only had time to take one small sip of mine.

“I’ve fallen into a fairy tale,” Joy mumbled while I was pouring her second drink.

“Sort of,” I said, returning her glass.

“With strange creatures, evil witches, and all that?”

“Enough strange creatures, I suppose. No witches, but there are wizards, some good, some not. That kind of magic is gender-specific.” The way Parthet put it was a lot earthier.
“The only woman with the balls for magic is the Great Earth Mother,”
he told me when I asked him about witches, “
and she is far beyond mere magic.”

“My Uncle Parker—his real name is Parthet, by the way—is a wizard.”

“That funny old man?” She hesitated a bit, took a more controlled drink of her whiskey, then said, “I guess he does look a little like the phony wizard in
The Wizard of Oz.”

“Well, Parthet may not be the most talented wizard around, but he
is
for real. So are the dragons, trolls, evil elflords, and all the rest.”

“Oh, shit,” Joy said. She took another long drink, coming close to the bottom of the glass again. I took a fair-sized drink myself. I had never heard her use the word
shit
before. She was starting to pick up one of my bad habits.

“You ready for the fifty-cent tour of Castle Cayenne?” I asked.

Her smile was weak, but she was trying. “Might as well,” she said. We both emptied our drinks first.

“We’re closer to the top than the bottom, so I guess we start there,” I said, leading her to the stairs.

Castle Cayenne was more than a thousand years old. At least some parts of the original were still in use, though the castle had been rebuilt, repaired, and renovated several times in that millennium. Even I had made some changes to the place in the three years since King Pregel presented it to me as my “local” residence. The biggest change was the water supply. We now had a fifteen-hundred-gallon water tank on the roof and a three-inch fire hose running from it to a small stream several hundred yards from the castle. I didn’t have a pump, but Uncle Parthet had come up with a dandy spell to make water run uphill—or up the hose at least—to keep the tank full, so I had running water in the castle. I even had hot water, during the day and for a few hours after sunset, on days when the sun shone. I didn’t have the most efficient solar system, but at least I could take a bath without freezing or having servants haul buckets of hot water up from the kitchen. Castle Cayenne also had a rudimentary septic tank and drainfield installed outside to help get rid of waste, along with the accompanying odors and health hazards that go with the lack of modern sewer systems. Maybe I couldn’t give Cayenne all of the modern conveniences, but when I moved in I was determined to go as far as I could.

Cayenne doesn’t even pretend at being fancy. It’s just a simple circular tower, sixty-five feet high and fifty in diameter, with crenelated parapets. There’s no outer wall, no gatehouse, outbuildings, moat, or little turrets sticking up at corners. It’s just a single naked tower. Cayenne was built in a region of Varay that had little to fear from outside invasion. The rationale was that it would help control bandits in the area—the foothills of the Titan Mountains—and there was little trouble with bandits any longer.

Joy and I climbed to the roof to start our tour of the castle. The roof has my water tank, a small shelter for a sentry (though I had never bothered to post a sentry since I took over the place), racks of spears and bins of arrows, and a small stack of stones for hurling down at attackers who had never come. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that some of those stones had been sitting there since the castle was first built.

The time difference between Chicago and Varay meant that it was still light out when Joy and I climbed to the top of Cayenne. Sunset was nearly a half hour off and we had a good view of the surrounding countryside—forest and low, rolling hills, with the mountains off in the distance, to the south.

“It’s not Kansas, not even Chicago,” I said. Joy nodded and tightened her grip on my arm. “To the south, those are the Titan Mountains, supposedly an impassable barrier with nothing beyond them.” I pointed. “Everything else you can see is southern Varay.”

“If the mountains weren’t so high, it might almost be Kentucky or Tennessee, maybe even the Ozarks,” Joy said softly. Her voice still sounded shaky, but not as bad as before.

“Pretty much,” I agreed. “The mountains are much higher, though, even higher than the Rockies. Maybe even up close to the Himalayas. But they are mountains. Maybe that’s why I like this part of the country.” Well, the terrain and the fact that it was about as far from the Isthmus of Xayber as I could get in Varay. According to Parthet and everyone else I consulted, the power of an elflord diminished in some kind of strict proportion to the distance from Fairy and his demesne.

The sixth floor of Cayenne, the first one below the roof, holds living quarters for the small live-in staff and my “retinue,” Lesh, Harkane, and Timon. The fifth floor holds my private apartments—bedroom, sitting room, bathroom. The fourth floor has a small office, but most of the level is set aside for weapons practice; call it a gymnasium. The third floor is Cayenne’s version of a great hall—not particularly great, but it takes up the entire level. The second floor has the scullery, larders, and various supply closets. The ground level is mostly a stable. The outer door is thick wood sheathed with metal, inside and out. Two wooden bars the size of railroad ties slide into metal brackets to lock the door. Other wooden bars could be propped against the door to give extra support, and outside there was a slight ramp leading down to grade, making it that much more difficult for attackers to batter down the door. A lockable wrought-iron gate across the bottom of the ramp was the final touch. There was no way to tell if the defenses were really adequate. They had never been fully tested.

Joy and I didn’t go all the way down to the ground floor, though. We stopped in the great hall. It was suppertime. I don’t have a large staff, but Lesh had obviously passed the word that I had returned.

“I’m starving,” Joy said when we smelled the food and saw the first trays being hauled up from the kitchen. I thought an appetite was a good sign.

“Oh, yes,” I said, and then I laughed. “That’s something else about this place. You eat and eat and can’t possibly get fat. It’s a literal impossibility.”

Joy giggled, and it sounded healthy rather than hysterical. I tried to hold back a sigh of relief.

“Now,
that’s
what I call a proper fairy-tale world,” she said.

We sat at the table and Timon rushed about to serve both of us. Joy was as upset at that kind of attention as I was when I first came to Varay, but I told her she would get used to it. … even though I had never really gotten comfortable with it myself and I usually told Timon to knock it off when we were “at home.” I didn’t permit any of the nonsense—two tables, servants eat “below the salt” or wait until afterward—at Cayenne that held most places in the buffer zone either. The cooks came out, and the two lads who helped Timon with the serving, Harkane, Lesh, and the six men-at-arms under Lesh’s command all sat at the table and we ate together. I introduced Joy to everyone.

And everyone dug right into the food. I ate with my customary abandon, but I kept watching Joy put away food at the same time. She
never
ate much. She was short and thin and she always told me that she intended to stay thin. But she didn’t show any diet control at all during her first meal in Varay. She put away food, wine, and coffee—especially a lot of food. It is probably an exaggeration to say that she ate as much in that one meal as she had in the year and odd months that I had known her, but it is a tempting exaggeration.

Timon loaded up our plates at the start of the meal, and whenever he happened to notice one of us getting low on anything, he tried to get around to replace it, but I kept waving him back to his seat. Even after three years, he couldn’t get it into his head that I really didn’t appreciate that kind of service at home. It might be socially required at Basil or elsewhere, but I didn’t want it in my own little place with no visiting big shots.

Cayenne is a compact little community. My two cooks and most of the others who work in the castle live in the small village that sits alongside the creek a few hundred yards downstream from the castle. The guards are the only locals who come close to living in the castle, and three of them have families in the village. Cayenne village was founded to supply the castle and it was still doing that after more than a thousand years.

The current population of Cayenne village was seventy-three.

I was just getting to the point where I was almost full when Parthet came barging in—clomping down the stairs from the passage to Castle Basil. I started to invite him to sit down and eat, but he didn’t give me a chance.

“Something extraordinary has happened,” he said, short of breath. “You’d better come along to Basil right now.”

“Slow down, have a beer,” I said. It was unlike Parthet to pass up any opportunity to eat, no matter what the crisis.

“No time. Come on, lad. This is urgent.” He appeared to notice Joy then. He smiled and winked at her. “Glad to see you finally made it here, my dear,” he said. Then he turned to me again. “What are you waiting for?”