Guns Of Avalon tcoa-2

by Roger Zelazny

  High ground ahead, and Star’s muscles bunching and relaxing, bunching and relaxing beneath me, as he leaps the rills and freshets, plunges through a racing, roiling sheet, and strikes the slope, hoofs sparkling against stones as we mount higher, the voice of the gurgling, eddying flow beneath us deepening to a steady roar…

  Higher, then, and dry, pausing to wring out the corners of my cloak… Below, behind, and to the right a gray, storm-tossed sea laps at the foot of the cliff we hold…

  Inland now, toward clover fields and evening, the boom of the surf at my back…

  Pursuing falling stars into the darkening east and eventual silence and night…

  Clear the sky and bright the stars, but a few small wisps of cloud…

  A howling pack of red-eyed things, twisting along our trail… Shadow… Green-eyed… Shadow… Yellow… Shadow… Gone…

  But dark peaks with skirts of snow, jostling one another about me… Frozen snow, as dry as dust, lifted in waves by the icy blasts of the heights… Powdery snow, flour-like… Memory here, of the Italian Alps, of skiing… Waves of snow drifting across stone faces… A white fire within the night air… My feet rapidly numbing within my wet boots… Star bewildered and snorting, testing each step and shaking his head as if in disbelief…

  So shadows beyond the rock, a gentler slope, a drying wind, less snow…

  A twisting trail, a corkscrew trail, an adit into warmth… Down, down, down the night, beneath the changing stars…

  Far the snows of an hour ago, now scrubby plants and level plain… Far, and the night birds stagger into the air, wheeling above the carrion feast, shedding hoarse notes of protest as we pass…

  Slow again, to the place where the grasses wave, stirred by the less cold breeze… The cough of a hunting cat… The shadowy flight of a bounding, deerlike beast… Stars sliding into place and feelings in my feet once more…

  Star rearing, neighing, racing ahead from some unseen thing… A long time in the soothing then, and longer still till the shivers go…

  Now icicles of a partial moon falling on distant treetops… Moist earth exhaling a luminescent mist… Moths dancing in the night light…

  The ground momentarily buckling and swaying, as if mountains were shifting their feet… To every star its double… A halo round the dumbbell moon… The plain, the air above it, filled with fleeting shapes…

  The earth, a wound-down clock, ticks and grows still… Stability… Inertia… The stars and the moon reunited with their spirits…

  Skirting the growing fringe of trees, west… Impressions of a sleeping jungle: delirium of serpents under oil cloth…

  West, west… Somewhere a river with broad, clean banks to ease my passage to the sea…

  Thud of hoofs, shuttling of shadows… The night air upon my face… A glimpse of bright beings on high, dark walls, shining towers… The air is sweetened… Vision swims… Shadows…

  We are merged, centaur-like, Star and I, under a single skin of sweat… We take the air and give it back in mutual explosions of exertion… Neck clothed in thunder, terrible the glory of the nostrils… Swallowing the ground…

  Laughing, the smell of the waters upon us, the trees very near to our left…

  Then among them… Sleek bark, hanging vines, broad leaves, droplets of moisture… Spider web in the moonlight, struggling shapes within… Spongy turf… Phosphorescent fungus on fallen trees…

  A clear space… Long grasses rustling…

  More trees…

  Again, the riversmell…

  Sounds, later… Sounds… The grassy chuckling of water…

  Closer, louder, beside it at last… The heavens buckling and bending in its belly, and the trees… Clean, with a cold, damp tang… Leftward beside it, pacing it now… Easy and flowing, we follow…

  To drink… Splashing in its shallows, then hockhigh with head depressed, Star, in it, drinking like a pump, blasting spray from his nostrils… Upriver, it laps at my boots… Dripping from my hair, running down my arms… Star’s head turning, at the laughter…

  Then downriver again, clean, slow, winding… Then straight, widening, slowing…

  Trees thickening, then thinning…

  Long, steady, slow…

  A faint light in the east…

  Sloping downward now, and fewer trees… Rockier, and the darkness made whole once again…

  The first, dim hint of the sea, lost an odor later… Clicking on, on, in the nightsend chill… Again, an instant’s salt…

  Rock, and an absence of trees… Hard, steep, bleak, down… Ever-increasing precipitousness…

  Flashing between walls of stone… Dislodged pebbles vanishing in the now racing current, their splashes drowned in the roar’s echoes… Deeper the defile, widening… Down, down… Farther still…

  Now pale once more the east, gentler the slope… Again, the touch of salt, stronger…

  Shale and grit… Around a corner, down, and brighter still… Steady, soft and loose the footing…

  The breeze and the light, the breeze and the light… Beyond a crop of rock… Draw rein.

  Below me lay the stark seaboard, where rank upon rank of rolling dunes, harassed by the winds out of the southwest, tossed spumes of sand that partly obliterated the distant outlines of the bleak morning sea.

  I watched the pink film spread across the water from the east. Here and there, the shifting sands revealed dark patches of gravel. Rugged masses of rock reared above the swell of the waves. Between the massive dunes — hundreds of feet in height — and myself, there high above that evil coast, lay a smashed and pitted plain of angular rocks and gravel, just now emerging from hell or night into dawn’s first glow, and alive with shadows.

  Yes, it was right.

  I dismounted and watched the sun force a bleak and glaring day upon the prospect. It was the hard, white light I had sought. Here, sans humans, was the necessary place, just as I had seen it decades earlier on the shadow Earth of my exile. No bulldozers, sifters, broom-wielding blacks; no maximum-security city of Oranjemund. No X-ray machines, barbed wire, or armed guards. None of these things here. No. For this shadow had never known a Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, and there had never been a Consolidated Diamond Mines of South West Africa, nor a government to approve their amalgamation of coastal mining interests. Here was the desert called Namib in that place some four hundred miles to the northwest of Cape Town, a strip of dunes and rocks ranging from a couple to a dozen miles in width and running along that forsaken coast line for perhaps three hundred miles on the seaward side of the Richtersveld Mountains, within whose shadow I now stood. Here, unlike any conventional mine, the diamonds were scattered as casually as bird droppings across the sand. I, of course, had brought along a rake and a sieve.

  I broke out the rations and prepared breakfast. It was going to be a hot, dusty day.

  As I worked the dunes, I thought of Doyle, the little wispy-haired jeweler with the brick-red complexion and wens on his cheeks, back in Avalon. Jewelers rouge? Why did I want all that jewelers rouge — enough to supply an army of jewelers for a dozen lifetimes? I had shrugged. What was it to him what I wanted it for, so long as I was able to pay for it? Well, if there was some new use for the stuff and good money to be made, a man would be a fool… In other words, he would be unable to furnish me with such a quantity within a week? Small, square chuckles had escaped through the gaps in his smile. A week? Oh, no! Of course not! That was ridiculous, out of the question… I saw. Well, a quick thanks and perhaps his competitor up the way might be able to produce the stuff, and might also be interested in a few uncut diamonds I was expecting in a matter of days… Diamonds, did I say? Wait. He was always interested in diamonds himself… Yes, but he was sadly deficient in the jewelers rouge department. A raised hand. It might be that he had spoken hastily with respect to his ability to produce the polishing material. It was the quantity that had disturbed him. But the ingredients were plentiful and the formula fairly simple. Yes, that was no real reason why some
thing could not be worked out. Within a week, at that. Now, about the diamonds…

  Before I left his shop, something had been worked out.

  I have met many persons who thought that gunpowder explodes, which of course is incorrect. It burns rapidly, building up gas pressure which ejects a bullet from the mouth of a shell and drives it through the barrel of a weapon, after having been ignited by the primer, which does the actual exploding when the firing pin is driven into it. Now, with typical family foresight, I had experimented with a variety of combustibles over the years. My disappointment at the discovery that gunpowder would not ignite in Amber, and that all of the primers I tested were equally inert there, was a thing mitigated only by the knowledge that none of my relatives could bring firearms into Amber either. It was much later, during a visit to Amber, after polishing a bracelet I had brought for Deirdre, that I discovered this wonderful property of jewelers rouge from Avalon when I disposed of the polishing cloth in a fireplace. Fortunately, the quantity involved was small, and I was alone at the time.

  It made an excellent primer, straight from the container. When cut with a sufficient quantity of inert material, it could also be made to burn properly.

  I kept this bit of information to myself, feeling that one day it would be used to decide certain basic issues in Amber. Unfortunately, Eric and I had our run-in before that day arrived and it went into storage along with all my other memories. When things finally did clear for me, my fortunes were quickly cast with those of Bleys, who was preparing an assault on Amber. He had not really needed me then, but had taken me in on the enterprise, I feel, so that he could keep an eye on me. Had I furnished him with guns, he would have been invincible and I would have been unnecessary. More important, had we succeeded in seizing Amber in accordance with his plans, the situation would have become strained indeed, with the bulk of the occupying forces, as well as the officers’ loyalty, his. Then I would have required something to adjust the balance of power more equitably. A few bombs and automatic weapons, say.

  Had I been my whole self even a month earlier, things would have been quite different. I could have been sitting in Amber, rather than being scorched, abraded, and desiccated, with another hellride before me and a knot of troubles to be worked out after that.

  I spat sand so that I would not choke when I laughed. Hell, we make our own ifs. I had better things to think about than what could have happened. Like Eric…

  I remember that day, Eric. I was in chains and I had been forced to my knees before the throne. I had already crowned myself, to mock you, and been beaten for it. The second time I had the crown in my hands, I threw it at you. But you caught it and smiled. I was glad that it was not damaged when it failed to damage you. Such a beautiful thing… All of silver, with its seven high points, and studded with emeralds to beat all diamonds. Two large rubies at either temple… You crowned yourself that day, all arrogance and hasty pomp. The first words that you spoke then were whispered to me, before the echoes of “Long live the king!” had died within the hall. I remember every one of them. “Your eyes have looked upon the fairest sight they ever will behold,” you said. Then, “Guards!” you ordered. “Take Corwin away to the smithy, and let his eyes be burnt from out his head! Let him remember the sights of this day as the last he might ever see! Then cast him into the darkness of the deepest dungeon beneath Amber, and let his name be forgotten!”

  “Now you reign in Amber,” I said aloud. “But I have my eyes, and I have neither forgotten nor been forgotten.”

  No, I thought. Wrap yourself in the kingship, Eric. The walls of Amber are high and thick. Stay behind them. Ring yourself with the futile steel of blades. Antlike, you armor your house in dust. You know now that you will never be secure so long as I live, and I have told you that I will be back. I am coming, Eric. I will bring me up guns out of Avalon, and I will break down your doors and smite your defenders. Then it will be as it was, briefly, another time, before your men came to you and saved you. That day I had only a few drops of your blood. This time, I will have it all.

  I uncovered another rough diamond, the sixteenth or so, and flipped it into the sack at my waist.

  As I faced the setting sun, I wondered about Benedict, Julian, and Gerard. What was the connection? Whatever, I did not like any combination of interests which involved Julian. Gerard was all right. I had been able to sleep back at the camp when I had thought that it was he whom Benedict was contacting. If he was now allied with Julian, though, it was cause for increased uneasiness. If anyone hated me even more than Eric, it was Julian. If he knew where I was, then my danger was great. I was not yet ready for a confrontation.

  I supposed Benedict could find a moral justification for selling me out at this point. After all, he knew that whatever I did — and he knew that I was going to do something — would result in strife in Amber. I could understand, even sympathize with, his feelings. He was dedicated to the preservation of the realm. Unlike Julian, he was a man of principle, and I regretted having to be at odds with him. My hope was that my coup would be as quick and painless as a tooth extraction under gas, and that we would be back on the same side again soon afterward. Having met Dara now, I also wanted it this way for her sake.

  He had told me too little for comfort. I had no way of knowing whether he really intended to remain in the field the entire week, or whether he was even now cooperating with the forces of Amber in the laying of my trap, the walling of my prison, the digging of my grave. I had to hurry, though I longed to linger in Avalon.

  I envied Ganelon, in whatever tavern or brothel he drank, whored, or fought, on whatever hillside he hunted. He had come home. Should I leave him to his pleasures, despite his offer to accompany me to Amber? But no, he would be questioned on my departure — used badly, if Julian had anything to do with it — and then become an outcast in what must seem his own land to him, if they let him go at all. Then he would doubtless become an outlaw again, and the third time would probably prove his undoing. No, I would keep my promise. He would come with me, if that was he still wanted. If he had changed his mind, well — I even envied him the prospect of outlawry in Avalon. I would have liked to remain longer, to ride with Dara in the hills, tramp about the countryside, sail upon the rivers…

  I thought about the girl. The knowledge of her existence changed things somewhat. I was not certain how. Despite our major hatreds and petty animosities, we Amberites are a very family-conscious bunch, always eager for news of one another, desirous to know everyone’s position in the changing picture. A pause for gossip has doubtless stayed a few death blows among us. I sometimes think of us as a gang of mean little old ladies in a combination rest home and obstacle course.

  I could not fit Dara into things yet because she did not know where she fit herself. Oh, she would learn eventually. She would receive superb tutelage once her existence became known. Now that I had brought her awareness of her uniqueness it would only be a matter of time before this occurred and she joined in the games. I had felt somewhat serpent-like at points during our conversation in the grove — but hell, she had a right to know. She was bound to find out sooner or later, and the sooner she did the sooner she could start shoring up her defenses. It was for her own benefit.

  Of course, it was possible — even likely — that her mother and grandmother had lived their lives in ignorance of their heritage…

  And where had it gotten them? They died violently, she had said.

  Was it possible, I wondered, that the long arm of Amber had reached for them out of Shadow? And that it might strike again?

  Benedict could be as tough and mean and nasty as any of us when he wanted to be. Tougher, even. He would fight to protect his own, doubtless even kill one of us if he thought it necessary. He must have assumed that keeping her existence a secret and keeping her ignorant would protect her. He would be angry with me when he found out what I had done, which was another reason for clearing out in a hurry. But I had not told her what I had out of sheer per
verseness. I wanted her to survive, and I did not feel he was handling things properly. When I returned, she would have had time to think things over. She would have many questions and I would seize the opportunity to caution her at length and to give specifics.

  I gnashed my teeth.

  None of this should be necessary. When I ruled in Amber, things would be different. They had to be…

  Why had no one ever come up with a way to change the basic nature of man? Even the erasure of all my memories and a new life in a new world had resulted in the same old Corwin. If I were not happy with what I was it could be a proposition worthy of despair.

  In a quiet part of the river, I washed away the dust, the sweat, wondering the while about the black road which had so injured my brothers. There were many things that I needed to know.

  As I bathed, Grayswandir was never far from my hand. One of us is capable of tracking another through Shadow, when the trail is still warm. As it was, my bath was undisturbed, though I used Grayswandir three times on the way back, on less mundane things than brothers.

  But this was to be expected, as I had accelerated the pace considerably…

  It was still dark, though dawn was not too far away, when I entered the stables at my brother’s manor. I tended Star, who had grown somewhat wild, talking to him and soothing him as I rubbed him down, then putting out a good supply of food and water. Ganelon’s Firedrake greeted me from the opposite stall. I cleaned up at the pump to the rear of the stable, trying to decide where I was going to catch a little sleep.

  I needed some rest. A few hours’ worth would hold me for a time, but I refused to take them beneath Benedict’s roof. I would not be taken that easily, and while I had often said that I wanted to die in bed, what I really meant was that in my old age I wanted to be stepped on by an elephant while making love.

  I was not averse to drinking his booze, though, and I wanted a belt of something strong. The manor was dark; I entered quietly and I found the sideboard.