“That was me,” said Elleena/Ellwood. “I wanted you to look at me like you looked at the Queen and to talk about me like you talk about the Queen.”
“But you are the Queen.”
“Yes, but you didn’t know that.”
“And you kissed me.”
“You kissed him?” asked Miriam, standing in the doorway in a long fluffy purple robe. “I thought you only liked women.”
“I don’t like women,” said Elleena/Ellwood. “But I never liked men either… not until I met you, Eaglethorpe.”
“You, which is to say you as the Queen, ordered me to kill you, which is to say you as my best friend,” I gasped. “What kind of sick game were you playing at?”
“I wanted to know who you loved more—your friend and companion or the Queen.”
“But they’re both you!” said I. “You lied to me. You’ve been lying to me for years. You played me for a fool. You’ve been playing me for a fool for years.”
“No, Eaglethorpe.”
“I have to get out of here.” I turned and ran for the secret doorway through which we had entered.
“Eaglethorpe, wait!” called Elleena.
But I didn’t wait. I ran down the narrow stone steps, though the passage, and out the secret door into the night. Zombies be damned.
Chapter Nineteen: In which I have a very bad night and there really are zombies.
I wandered around in the darkness, not really caring where I went. Finally I skirted along the edge of the cemetery and into the door of a tavern called The Winking Wench, not to be confused with The Wicked Wench, which is a tavern in Antriador. It was quite full, mostly with merchants and upper class types. Stepping up to the bar, I looked at the man behind it, a rather skinny hawkish fellow.
“Give me a pint of ale and a bottle of the strongest thing you have in the house,” said I, throwing down half a crown.
The fellow nodded and a moment later I was staring at a frothy stein of ale and a bottle of the most sickening looking liquid I had ever seen.
“What is this?”
“Troll whiskey.”
“What’s that floating in it?”
“Piece of troll.”
“Which piece?” I wondered.
He stared at the bottle. “I’m going to say a thumb.”
“All right then,” I said. Pulling out the cork and tipping the bottle up to my lips, I drank down several mouthfuls of the foul liquid. It burned. It burned a lot. And it burned all the way down. Setting the bottle down, I drained my stein of ale and ordered another. Within a half hour, I had drained the bottle, leaving the troll “thumb” glistening at the bottom, and had downed somewhere between six and eight steins of ale, which is to say, seven. I was pondering ordering another bottle of troll whisky, when someone from across the room called my name.
“There’s Eaglethorpe Buxton!” he called. “Give us a story, eh?”
For the first time in my life, I did not feel like telling a story. I turned to say as much to the fellow who had spoken, but he turned into three men and began doing cartwheels. I grabbed the bar and shook my head, but now everyone was doing cartwheels.
“Go away,” said I.
“Come on!” he called.
“Yeah, come on!” called someone else. “Tell us the story of the Queen of Aerithraine.”
“The Queen of Aerithraine is a stupid cow!” I shouted back. “And I’ll fight any man that says different.”
This might have been a fine thing to say in Oordport or Antriador, both of which are beautiful cities and far away from Aerithraine, but as I was in Illustria, the capital of Aerithraine, I perhaps could have chosen my words better. I woke up in the early morning mist, lying face down in the mud, bruised all over, and with my weapons and purse gone.
I climbed to my feet with the aid of a nearby hitching post. My sides hurt so badly that I wouldn’t have been surprised to find I had three or four broken ribs. Washing my face in the horse trough, I discovered that my nose was not exactly where I had left it, which is to say it was broken and leaning decidedly to the right.
Staggering through the streets, still hidden in a thick mist, I finally made my way back to the stables near The Tumbling Stone. Here I had left my saddlebags and spare gear, among which were an extra sword and a few emergency coins.
“You have a lot of nerve coming back here without a carrot,” said Hysteria, when I reached her stall.
“I know, I know,” said I. “But my purse was stolen. You would think that a faithful steed, which is to say a horse, would make allowances for something like that.”
I looked around for the stable girl, to whom I knew the voice of Hysteria actually belonged, but couldn’t see her anywhere. I was tired and sore and by this time my head was pounding, so I sat down in the corner of the stall, leaned my back against a pile of hay, and went to sleep.
“Eaglethorpe. Eaglethorpe, are you all right?”
I looked up to see Queen Elleena standing next to my horse. She wasn’t dressed in shining armor with a purple cloak, or a beautiful dress, low cut and blossoming into a long train. She wasn’t dressed as a male adventurer either, which is to say like Ellwood Cyrene. She wore a simple brown dress and a red travelling cloak.
I stood up and steadied myself.
“You look horrible, Eaglethorpe.”
“Hello Miriam,” I said, looking down into her bosoms. “What are you doing away from the castle?”
“It’s my day off,” she said. “The Queen is running things. I’m off for some breakfast. Do you know anyplace that has a good pie?”
“Oh crap!” said I. “I am supposed to meet Celia this morning at the bakery.”
“And just who is this Celia woman?” she demanded.
“You know good and well that she’s my sister.”
“How would I know that?”
“Oh,” said I, after thinking about it. “There is no reason you would know. It’s just that you look so much like… you know who…”
“Come on,” she said. “I’ll buy you a piece of pie.”
I can honestly say that I have never said ‘no’ to a woman who wanted to buy me pie, and I wasn’t about to start now. We walked arm in arm, which is to say that Miriam helped me walk because I was still quite unsteady, to the bakery and arrived just in time to find Celia and Tuki standing outside.
“Eaglethorpe!” called my sister. “I thought I would miss you. What the hell happened to your nose? Here let me help you.”
Celia reached up and took hold of my nose, shoving it into its proper position, just as she has done on numerous other occasions. It was an incredibly painful process, but one that was completely necessary in order to maintain the handsome profile that so many have come to appreciate.
“Let us go inside and have some pie,” said I. “You can’t leave until this mist clears up anyway.”
The four of us, which is to say Tuki and Celia and Miriam and myself, sat down at a table and Accordia brought us a warm blueberry pie with a large crockery bowl of freshly whipped sweet cream. It made for a first rate breakfast.
“So who exactly is this woman?” wondered Tuki, pointing at Miriam.
“My name is Miriam,” said Miriam, “and as it turns out, I am integral to the plot.”
“You look very familiar,” said Celia. “I think you look a bit like Ellwood Cyrene. You’re not related are you?”
“No,” said Miriam.
“I think you look a bit like the Queen,” said Tuki. “You can’t be related to her. She’s an orphan.”
“So, I’ve heard,” said Miriam.
We chatted a bit and I particularly chatted with Celia, though it was nothing of import that we discussed. I did inform her that it was likely I would visit the family in Dewberry Hills. Before we knew it, we had finished off the entire pie. Tuki led Celia into the back room to give her something, leaving Miriam and me alone at the table.
“That pie was delicious,” she said.
“Yes, it was.
”
“What are you going to do now?”
“I have to find a vendor of carrots for my faithful horse,” I informed her. “After that I don’t know, though I do plan to visit Dewberry Hills soon, as you have no doubt heard me tell my sister, and I definitely plan to stay away from The Winking Wench for the foreseeable future.”
“She loves you, you know.”
“The Winking Wench loves me?”
“Of course not.”
“Then just who is it that supposedly loves me?”
“Elleena,” said Miriam. “I’ve known her a long time and I’ve never seen her this way over a man. That’s why I always just assumed she liked girls. But she really loves you.”
“Would that be Elleena, the Queen of Aerithraine with whom I never had the pleasure of spending a fortnight, or Elleena, the woman laughing behind my back as she pretended to be my companion and friend in countless adventures.”
“She said you had forty-two adventures.”
“It depends on how you count them,” said I. “I didn’t say ‘countless adventures’ because I couldn’t count them if I had wanted to. Saying countless adventures is just another way of saying many adventures or a more than normal amount of adventures or a surplus of adventures.”
“All right, don’t get yourself in a lather. I’m sure you’ve had many great adventures.”
“Oh, I have. And we have. I’ve probably had more than she has, but most of them we had together, or at least our adventures overlapped in some form. That’s sort of the way adventures are. You can be having an adventure and someone else can have an adventure that runs right over yours in the middle. Or you can have one adventure and think it’s all but over and another adventure pops up before you’re even done. You’re riding along one minute perfectly happy rescuing an elven princess and you’re attacked by goblins. You can be fighting an evil sorceress and run right into an attractive maiden that needs rescue. You can be fighting trolls and suddenly monkey people are falling from the sky. You barely finish eating pie and the city is overrun by zombies.”
“Oh my!” shouted Miriam. “Zombies!”
“I was just using that as an example.”
“No, look!” she screamed, pointing out the window. Hordes of zombies were shambling, which is to say walking like a zombie, down the street.
“We’ll never get out of here with our brains intact!” she cried.
“Get Tuki and Celia,” said I. “I’ll distract the zombies.”
I shot out of the bakery and ran to the mouth of the alley. The shuffling undead seemed not to notice me.
“The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides!” I shouted.
Immediately the zombies turned toward me, reached out their arms, opened their drooling mouths, and said “brains.”
“So now there are zombies in this story?” Miriam called to me from across the road.
“I think I have foreshadowed zombies brilliantly,” said I.
Chapter Twenty: In which I save the world from zombies and some other minor things happen to tie up the loose ends of the story.
I ran down the alley, and every zombie within the sound of my shout, which is to say all of them, followed after me. Zombies can’t resist a big juicy brain, especially one that can perform geometric calculations, solve quadratic equations, or conjugate verbs in a foreign language, none of which I can actually do, but zombies are perhaps not as discerning as they should be. I darted this way and that, easily outpacing the decaying monsters. They were slow but came on inexorably, which is to say unrelentingly or inevitably or remorselessly, or in this case all three.
I rounded another corner and came face to face with the end of the alley. It was a dead end, which would have been ironic had I been chased by living things, but as I was being chased by dead things, it was just sort of poetic. I turned around and the zombies continued toward me, just as inexorable and unrelenting and inevitable and remorseless as before.
Glancing to my right, I saw a door. It wasn’t just any door either. It was the back door to the fine public bath that I had previously visited, which is to say in chapter four and five. Yanking it open, I ran inside just ahead of the grey-fleshed fiends. Beyond the door was a long but narrow storage room with another door on the other side. I raced through this second door to find myself in the enormous cool bathing room. It was so early that there were no customers as yet. The only person present was the boy who had given me a back massage, Lespie by name.
“Quick!” I shouted as I walked quickly around the side of the pool—walked because running near the pool was strictly prohibited. “Bolt those side doors then move these lounges to block the sides of the pool.”
“Ack! Zombies!” he cried.
“Even so. Now do as I said. I want to force these zombies into the water.”
He did as directed, blockading one side of the pool with lounge chairs while I did the same thing on the other side. Then Lespie joined me at the far end of the pool as the zombies began wading across. While they weren’t very impressive as far as swimming was concerned, they were excellent waders.
“Nothing’s happening,” I said.
“What did you expect?”
“I expected some boiling and churning. I expected that the zombies would dissolve, leaving us with something akin to zombie soup.”
“Why would you expect that?” wondered Lespie.
“I was told you used holy water.”
“No, we use wholly water, as in water with nothing added to it.”
“Oh bother,” said I. “Grab those two pitchers of massage oil and follow me.”
Dragging the boy with me, I ran out the front door of the building. Taking one of the large pottery pitchers of oil, I poured the inflammable liquid, which is to say the flammable liquid, as flammable and inflammable oddly enough mean the same thing, all over the front entrance of the baths.
“Go to that house across the street and get the oil lamp in the window,” I ordered Lespie.
While he ran off to complete his errand, I ran around to the back of the baths and closed the door behind the last zombie. Then I doused the back wall with the other pitcher of oil. When I returned to the front, the boy had arrived with a lit lantern, which I took from him and dashed across the front of the building. Immediately the wood structure exploded into flames. We could still hear the zombies inside as the fire engulfed them, but unlike living creatures that might have been expected to scream hideously, they continued only to moan hideously. The building was one great pyre when an entire troop of knights arrived, led by Queen Elleena, bright shining armor beneath her purple cloak.
“The zombies have been taken care of, Your Majesty,” said I, with a bow.
“You know this entire block is going to burn down, don’t you?” she said, looking around.
“It was his oil.” I pointed at Lespie.
“Think of it as an opportunity, You Majesty,” said Lespie. “You can rebuild this ugly old part of the city.
“Yes,” mused the Queen. “I can see it now—a marble bathhouse, a museum, a theater, maybe an opera house…”
“Perhaps another orphanage,” I suggested.
“Captain of the Guard,” called the Queen. “Take this boy back to the palace. He is to be given a knighthood.
She dismounted. “Take the rest of your men and my horse with you. He doesn’t like the fire. I will be along in a few minutes.”
Although none of the sturdy warhorses present, including the Queen’s great white charger, seemed the least bit bothered by the huge fire, the soldiers and their captain did as they were ordered and all left, save only two who remained without their horses to serve as bodyguards. Elleena took hold of my arm and guided me away from the increasingly hot side of the street to the other less hot side of the street.
“The mist is fading,” she said. “It will be a pleasant day.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“I
can’t believe you put the blame on that boy.”
“You mean you can’t believe I gave him the credit,” said I.
“I will admit that one is as unlikely as the other.” She paused and looked into my eyes. “We can’t see each other anymore, Eaglethorpe.”
“What?”
“We can’t see each other anymore. I have feelings for you, deep feelings, but I am the Queen and we would never be allowed to be together. I don’t want to see you if I can never be with you. I just couldn’t stand it. So I want you to leave Illustria. Go visit your family, live your life, forget about me, and never come back here.”
She turned and walked away. Her two bodyguards fell in step behind her.
“Goodbye Queen Elleena of Aerithraine, with whom I once had the pleasure of spending five years.”
* * * * *
A week later I relaxed beneath a tree in the front yard of my parents’ new home in Dewberry Hills. My father and mother and Aunt Oregana sat on the front porch, the latter two talking animatedly about the neighborhood gossip, though I could hear my father’s snoring over their words. Cousin Gervil walked hand in hand with his friend Rupert along the edge of the pond. Hysteria wandered through my father’s garden eating turnip and carrot tops. The smells of recently cut hay and wildflowers mingled with the aroma of the Boysenberry Get-Your-Head-Out-of-your-Ass Pie, cooling on the windowsill. I moved down so that I could recline completely, using a root for a pillow.
“That’s the stupidest story you’ve yet come up with,” said Ellwood Cyrene, rolling over and propping his head up with his hand.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“There hasn’t been a zombie outbreak in Illustria in months.”
“So I’m a bit ahead of the curve,” said I, “historically speaking.”
“The ending was just ridiculous.” His voice became sultry falsetto. “Oh Eaglethorpe, I love you so much I just can’t stand to see you anymore. Please leave forever.”
“I thought it was very touching.”
“And this whole thing about me, being a woman.”
Many Adventures of Eaglethorpe Buxton Page 17
