The Golden Shield of IBF

by Jerry Ahern; Sharon Ahern

  “Those K’Ur’Mir who were not killed in the rush were put to death, cruelly,” Erg’Ran told his young swordsman friend. His own voice sounding odd to him, Erg’Ran went on anyway. “I’d taken a spear in the shoulder and a mace split my helmet and didn’t do very much good for the thick skull underneath it. When I awoke, madness ruled. I saw more use of the disemboweling hook that day than I ever want to see again, lad. The smoke from the burning flesh on the pyres where the bodies of the K’Ur’Mir were being burned was thick enough to make you choke, and if you hadn’t been crying already because of the carnage, the smoke alone would have brought tears to the eyes.

  “And I thought that was what Eran had planned for me, the hook for a long, slow time, then skinning me until unconsciousness ended her pleasure, then the flames. But I was mistaken. I had never seen Eran so exhausted, her magic so depleted. But apparently she’d saved enough of it to deal with me. In those days, you see, she’d already begun transmuting men into lesser animals, beasts that could do nothing but dumbly serve her will. This was the fate that she chose for me. That’s how I came to chop off my own foot, lad.”

  Gar’Ath’s eyes hardened and he swallowed several times, his J’Lag bobbing up and down visibly in his throat.

  Erg’Ran told him the rest. “Eran told me that I’d be sickened by my fate when the change began, and she wanted that, for me to see what I would become. So, she started the transmutation with my left foot. If there’d been guards holding me, they might have been changed, too. So I was just supposed to stand there. In the same instant that her guards released my arms and she started to transmute me, I jumped for the nearest weapon. I was pretty agile in those days, a young lad like yourself, Gar’Ath.

  “I was well fast enough to grab the axe that I carry to this day. Took it right speedily from a Sword of Koth captain. Had to kill him with it.” Erg’Ran shrugged. “That’s what took the time. You see, lad, I was a wee bit too slow for Eran’s foul magic. It had already begun to transmute me. My left foot was drawing up into the cloven hoof of a gar’de’thu, the big kind.”

  “So, you hacked it off with the axe?”

  Erg’Ran nodded. “Only thing I could think of, but there was the little problem of bleeding to death. I let swing with the axe, severing my foot with a single blow. I knew, from my studies, that I’d be dead within a few blinks of the eye from the loss of blood. Unless, that is, I could seal the wound. There was only one way for that. With all the speed I could muster, I jumped for the nearest of the pyres.

  “Until the moment that I thrust my stump into the flames, there wasn’t even any pain,” Erg’Ran confided. “When the flames touched what was left of me down there, I nearly fell into a faint with it. To this day, lad, I don’t know how I got myself away from the fire and to the edge of the chalk cliff. But I did. The courage of Mir was with me for sure! I flung myself over the edge, believing that if I died on the rocks below, it would be a far better fate than I’d suffer at the hands of Eran. And, as my being here happily demonstrates, Gar’Ath, there was at least a slight chance that I’d survive.”

  “So, you hit the water, not the rocks. But, still, old friend—”

  “I know. I know. At any event, the icy waters of Woroc’Il’Lod extinguished the flame where I’d sealed my wound. I was incredibly weak, but I held onto that axe, let me tell you. I congratulated myself that I might not have a left foot anymore, but at least I wasn’t a blasted gar’de’thu for Eran to sport with.

  “The tide was coming in and I washed ashore, more dead than alive. What little magic I knew, I used to hold back the pain and the fever and to separate the salts from the water so that I could drink, make up for the blood that I’d lost. I lived along the shore for many days, dragging myself about as need be when I had to, living off whatever edibles I could find. Gradually, I got back enough strength to fashion myself a crutch from driftwood, then a crude peg. The first time I stood on it, I almost wished I had died. The only things that kept me going were the courage of Mir and the thought of her.” And Erg’Ran nodded toward the Virgin Enchantress. “I knew that she could grow up to be the only hope for Creath, the only hope to defeat her mother. And, I’d be damned before I’d let Eran make the young Enchantress a servant to her evil.”

  “You’re a brave man, Erg’Ran,” Gar’Ath told him.

  “You missed the point of the story, lad. I wasn’t brave. I just did what I had to do to stay alive, and with the courage of Mir and my belief in that young girl giving me strength, I lived. The point is that there’s a boundary that can be crossed with the magic, and once it’s crossed there’s no returning. If the Champion lives, and the Enchantress goes on to Barad’Il’Koth in fulfillment of the prophecies of Mir, the only way still that Eran can be defeated is if the Enchantress has magic stronger than hers. If we win the day over Eran and the Horde, but lose the Enchantress to the evil magic as a result, all is lost in Creath, lost forever.”

  The chanting in the Old Tongue had stopped.

  Erg’Ran’s pipe had gone out. He sucked on it once to be sure, and that sound was the only sound.

  Swan’s magic did not give her the ability to read the thoughts of men as if they were runes inscribed upon a scroll, but to know what Erg’Ran and Gar’Ath had to be thinking required no such power. They thought that she was reanimating the dead, but she was not.

  Perhaps her mother could do that—not the elaborate spellworking with the simplistically brutish monsters on Arba’Il’Tac, but truly bring back to life a complex, sentient being as if death had never taken place. Perhaps she could do that, too, Swan realized, shuddering at the thought.

  What Swan spellworked with the spirit and the body of Al’An was not that dark a magic; yet she knew that if such were required, she would do it to save him. And that frightened her even more.

  Her magical energy was as it should be, despite what she had expended on Arba’Il’Tac, despite going after Al’An when he was about to die. By the time she reached him, there was just enough left to her to do what needed to be done, then transport them to the summer palace. That accomplished, although she would have had it otherwise, she had rested.

  There was such great magical energy which was one with the summer palace that within a brief time, all that which she had expended was restored. And Swan was able to draw upon more energy as required for the healing spells to be employed.

  At last, Al’An opened his eyes.

  “I love you, Al’An,” Swan whispered. He closed his eyes, and she merely knelt beside him, watching his chest rise and fall, then rise again.

  Gar’Ath had fallen asleep. Erg’Ran had not. Erg’Ran jostled the young swordsman’s shoulder.

  “What is it?”

  “He lives, lad. The Champion lives! And so do our hopes!”

  Chapter Nine

  Alan Garrison awoke to the sounds of music and laughter, opened his eyes and turned his head, a window—as large as a good-sized door—fully open to his right, near the foot of the bed, sunlight streaming in through it.

  There was a very faint smell of flowers on the gentle breeze which flowed over him.

  From the chest down, he was covered in a light blanket.

  Without thinking, he sat up abruptly.

  The blanket fell away, and he realized that he was naked beneath it. His body seemed to be without harm, moved at his will, showed no evidence of scarring, neither were there bruises nor abrasions apparent.

  He was hungry without feeling malnourished.

  Garrison looked down to his left. The bed was of extremely generous proportions, larger than king-size. Swinging his feet over the side, they barely touched the stone floor. The bed was so high that a single-step ladder was beside it. A ruffled canopy was stretched over it.

  Garrison stood up, the stone cool but not cold beneath his bare feet. He snatched the blanket from the bed and wrapped it about himself at the waist. He felt a little unsteady, but he had no idea how long he’d been—what, he wondered? How long had he
been unconscious? Or—Garrison shivered when he considered the alternative.

  Garrison walked toward the window. The blanket—it dragged around his feet—nearly caused him to trip. As he approached the window, the sounds of music and laughter grew louder. When he looked out the window, Garrison blinked.

  “This is it,” Garrison told himself. “I died and wound up inside A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.” Half expecting to see either Bing Crosby or William Bendix if he studied the faces below him, Garrison turned his back and leaned hard against the window opening.

  He’d been riding on the back of the flying monster thing and about to crash when he saw a bird. Then there was this blinding light. And he was floating. And he saw Swan. After that, he was in darkness. Garrison remembered seeing Swan again, after that, and—Had she actually told him, “I love you,” or—“I’m really fantasizing,” Garrison half-whispered, shaking his head.

  He looked outside again. If he had to wake up inside a movie, he supposed this one was as good as any. More or less, anyway. Bendix had really been good as Sir What’s-his-name, one of the few actors who could play a comedic role just as brilliantly as he played a psychopathic killer, as he had opposite Alan Ladd. The spelling of Garrison’s first name was due to Alan Ladd; his mother had always been a great fan of the actor.

  “More stuff to think about besides this,” Garrison murmured. He looked out the window again.

  There were no suits of armor on the men, but some of the women wore those weirdo pointed duncecap hats with goofy scarves flowing from them. And the music—it sounded kind of nice, contra-dance-like with flutes and everything—fit in perfectly. Garrison’s eyes tracked toward the origin of the music. “Yeah, I’m dead or nuts or something!” Flutes, little drums, mandolins, tinkling bells, all of them floating in the air totally unsupported and playing themselves.

  Garrison rubbed his hands over his eyes, realizing as he did so that he had dropped the blanket and was standing stark naked in the open window.

  He stepped back, and as he picked up the blanket, he began to look about the room. There was a small, round table. “Round table! Oh, boy. Betcha all the tables are round here.” On the table were his personal belongings, except for his clothes: his three pistols, spare magazines, his knives, his wallet, money clip, badge case, keys, cigarettes and fighter.

  Garrison went over to the table, holding the blanket around his waist with one hand, shaking a cigarette from the pack with the other. He lit up. His hand shook, and not from a craving for nicotine. The pack was full, but it hadn’t been. They didn’t sell cigarettes in Creath, nor, for that matter, in old movie musicals set in Camelot.

  There was a big wooden cabinet at the far end of the room, the kind called an armoire. Garrison walked over to it, opened its double doors. His clothes were inside it, totally devoid of bloodstains. Garrison shivered again. When he’d seen his body—he remembered seeing it—there was blood on his clothing. A lot of it. He closed his eyes. He remembered seeing his eyes open, staring. He’d seen dead bodies on the street and in morgues; when he’d seen his body, it was dead.

  “Oh, shit,” Garrison rasped.

  He wondered if there was such a thing as a shower around here? At the foot of the bed there was a chamber pot. “I’m doomed to primitive plumbing. Great.”

  Alan Garrison had never urinated into a chamber pot before, but he figured that there was a first time for almost everything...

  Neither of his SIG-Sauer P-220 .45s showed the slightest sign of being damaged from impact against the rock surface of Arba’Il’Tac. He would have figured that the one he’d had only stuffed into his belt would have gotten scratched or something. In fact, a small crack he’d had in one of the pistols’ grip panels wasn’t even there anymore. Short of shooting them to be sure, they seemed mechanically perfect.

  All of his belongings were perfect.

  There’d been a couple of scratches on his bomber jacket, and there were worn smooth places around its elbows. Not anymore.

  The Pocket Natural which he used with the little Seecamp .32 had been with him for several years. As a result of constant contact with the oils from his hands, the natural finish leather had developed “the patina of use,” as advertising people called it; the leather had darkened quite a bit. As Garrison snugged the holster and the little pistol which it carried into his right front pocket, he noticed that the leather looked as fresh and clean as the day he’d gotten it. All wear marks were also absent from the little pistol’s surface.

  Not the tiniest scratch was in evidence on the crystal of his Rolex, nor did the bar-shaped scar on his left wrist remain. The soles and heels of his cowboy boots looked brand new and the leather uppers gleamed as if spit-shined. A crown on the lower left side of his mouth wasn’t there anymore; a natural-seeming tooth was where it had been.

  Rubbing the back of his hand along his jawline, Garrison felt no stubble, as if he’d shaved less than an hour ago; but he hadn’t shaved since Saturday morning, the day he’d met Swan.

  “Okay. Sure.”

  The music and laughter persisted from the courtyard below his window. Alan Garrison set out to investigate.

  By the time he’d descended the stairs, Garrison was used to torches in sconces along the walls flickering to life as he neared them, extinguishing themselves after he passed.

  He wasn’t surprised when the metal-studded double doors leading from what was apparently an entry hall opened without his touching them. Beyond the doorway lay a flagstoned courtyard. If he had his bearings correctly, the music and laughter, which he could hear only very faintly at the moment, would be off to his left, in what he mentally labeled “the backyard,” which was a perfectly logical place to hold a party. Nothing odd about that.

  Garrison started off in what he hoped was the right direction, the steadily increasing sounds of music and laughter reassuring him. Leaving the courtyard, he passed beneath an elaborately latticed rose arbor, blossoms trellised above him and on both sides, the colors ranging from bright yellow to warm pink to brilliant shades of red, their smell heady on the warm air. He was, in fact, just slightly uncomfortable with his bomber jacket, but kept it on to cover the double shoulder holsters.

  There was a natural stone pathway leading upward, wide enough for several men to walk abreast. Garrison followed it. He realized that the building seemed to grow out of a hillside, the contours of structure and grounds in perfect harmony.

  The path was interrupted by a bridge, the kind of bridge one usually saw in ornamental gardens, gently arched, but here crossing over a fast moving little stream. Garrison stood at the center of the bridge, looking down. There were fish swimming rapidly beneath him, patches of white foam where the tumbling waters broke around higher rocks to form miniature rapids.

  The sun was strong, warm, the air so fresh that merely breathing it was nearly dizzying.

  Garrison didn’t keep track of how long he stood there on the bridge, but after a time he continued on, leaving the bridge and rejoining the stone path, climbing gently upward.

  Trees were everywhere flanking the path, the huge ones that were called Ka’B’Oos, and ordinary seeming pines and willows.

  A waist-high stone wall was coming into view as he walked on. It extended outward and back from both sides of the path, at its center a tall archway. The sounds which he had been following—partially masked by the muted roar of fast rushing water—were considerably louder. The music fell so pleasantly on the ear that it had Garrison himself wondering—stupidly—if it were available on CD.

  A few yards after passing beneath the archway, the path took an abrupt left. There was another bridge; but, a moment after first spotting this, his eyes were drawn to the waterfall cascading out of the living rock perhaps a quarter mile upstream. The water still frothed, flowing along beneath the span.

  Garrison paused on this bridge as well, the waterfall’s beauty compelling him to do so. And the air, which rushed toward him, cooled by the water, invi
gorated him.

  Exhaling so deeply that the act became a sigh, Garrison quit the bridge, taking up the path once more. It wound through a grove of heavy-boughed willows, the music and laughter nearly at full volume. As it passed out of the timber, the stone path ended and an expanse of lush green lawn, stretching as far and wide as a dozen football fields, lay before him. To his immediate left lay the wall in which, several stories up, the window from which he’d first looked out was set. Near the wall were well over a hundred people in groups small and large, some seated on the grass, some standing, children running about madly playing.

  The majority of men were clad in leather jerkins over billowing-sleeved shirts, their legs in tights of red or green or black. Each, of course, was armed with sword and dagger. The women wore long dresses of every description and color, some quite elaborate, others simple. Although many were bareheaded, just as many wore the silly duncecap headgear or simple veils or crowns of flowers wound into elaborately arranged hair.

  There were pits, what looked to be pigs—or something similar—roasting in them, small groups of the men, like men everywhere, overseeing the barbecue. Tables—these attended by some of the women—were being set with bowls of fruit and vegetables and trays of bread.

  The instruments—no musicians—kept playing, floating in midair, roving, from group to group, like strolling players. He wondered, absently, if they got tipped?

  Garrison took a deep breath and started walking in the direction of the throng. A freight train of frantically running children stormed past him so rapidly that he nearly stumbled into them. He heard a woman’s voice chiding them to watch where they were going. He kept going, looking for a familiar face, hoping he’d find one in particular.

  And he did. She was part of a group of a half dozen women, laying out food on one of the tables. Buffet-style, he supposed. Garrison quickened his pace, approaching her.