by Lionel Fenn
"Who's them?"
"Those guys with the hair."
"And who's those?"
"Those guys over there, the ones with the teeth."
He looked in the direction her beak was pointing. South, as it turned out, toward a narrow, dusty side road along which marched a fair-sized contingent of medium-sized, human-looking creatures whose sunburnt faces seemed to be more fangs than flesh. They were in what appeared to be well-used battle dress—full armor, pikes and swords and maces—and had a look about them of an army hunting for a decent war. Red paid no attention when Gideon tried to turn him around, and Tuesday attempted to burrow into the giant goat's mane, which the giant goat didn't have, which frustrated her into volunteering to fly back to Chute and warn him of the impending conflict.
Gideon agreed, snapped the bat to hand, and turned sideways as best he could when he and the toothsome army reached the junction at the same time. He tensed. He held his breath. He swallowed when the leader, who wore a gaudy red ribbon around his neck, saluted him and snapped orders at his men to fall in behind. Another salute, which Gideon belatedly returned, and the tramping took on a marching cadence.
Tuesday came back and leaned on Red's head. "Chute says they're good guys."
"I gathered."
She craned her neck to look around him. "Ugly little critters, aren't they."
"I don't make judgments on appearance," he said as he waited for his breathing to return to normal. "They are obviously part of Ivy's army."
"I wonder if the guy with the ribbon is in love with her."
He snarled; she laughed and flew off again, returning less than ten minutes later to tell him that at the next intersection there was a group of canaries waiting to join them.
"Canaries?"
"Well, they have yellow feathers, cute little beaks, and a row of spikes down their backs. Except for the spikes, they're canaries. Well, and except for the size."
Gideon wasn't about to ask. He decided he wanted to be surprised. Which he was when he saw the canaries, who had the feathers and the beaks and the spikes, and who were fully twelve feet tall on legs that didn't look strong enough to hold a sickly sparrow on a windless day. The leader, who wore a purple sash across his broad chest, saluted him. Gideon saluted back. The canary saluted the tooth. The tooth saluted back. The canaries fell in between the teeth and the hair, and Gideon rode on refusing to look behind him.
At midday they forded a deep, swift stream, yet no one suggested they stop for refreshment.
An hour later Tuesday landed again on Red's head, and closed one eye. "You're not going to believe this one," she said.
"Try me," he answered.
"Blimps."
She was wrong and, Gideon thought, somewhat uncharitable.
At the next intersection, on a small trail leading into the plain from the left, stretched a column of men whose weight he judged to range between four hundred pounds and out of the question. They carried what appeared to be two-bladed swords, and they wore lederhosen and diaphanous pastel shirts of rainbow profusion, obviously secure in the knowledge that no one would have the temerity to remark on their wardrobe.
Gideon saluted the leader, who was in blue and yellow.
The leader saluted back and suggested, in a rolling deep voice, that he and his men bring up the rear.
Tuesday gagged and flew off somewhere askew.
Gideon merely nodded and looked forward again, seeing in the near distance the sparkling clear water of the Rush, the main river of the land, deep and cool and the cause of his near drowning a hundred lifetimes ago. Again they forded, since he had yet to come across anyone who had ever heard of a bridge over water; such a skill such a structure required was reserved, as far as he knew, for building them only over large holes in the ground.
The afternoon wore on.
The company became an army as several more groups fell in behind him, and when he finally looked over his shoulder he was astounded to realize how many bodies there were back there—if it was less than a thousand, he would turn in his bat. He blinked, looked ahead hurriedly, and tried to forget they were there, and that he, by virtue of a reputation he hadn't known he had, was leading them. Like a parade without music. Like a general before battle. Like an idiot, he thought, who hasn't the faintest idea where he's going, and if someone doesn't tell me soon, somebody back there is going to get awfully mad.
The Scarred Mountains were nearer now, almost fully to his left, and the peaks, though not high, were clouded in mist. He knew they formed a huge bowl on the other side, in which was the village of Kori, from which came the woman Glorian who had gotten him into this mess in the first place. To his right, the plain continued to the forest on the horizon.
The scenery hadn't changed by the time the sun had set, and the air was soon filled with a cacophony of orders in a myriad of languages that sounded more like barnyard bickering than the bark of a prepared military expedition. Campfires were set for those who needed the warmth against the cold of the night, and it wasn't long before Gideon could hear voices raised in song, harmonies alien to the ear but tender to the heart.
He had his own fire. Red was off foraging, and Tuesday was dozing. He ate, added a few more branches to the flames, and wrapped his cloak snugly around his shoulders.
No one came to speak with him.
No one came to pick a fight.
It was very dark, and it was very lonely, and he said nothing when the lorra returned, merely snuggled into the silken hair.
Life at the top, he thought, and fell instantly asleep, and was instantly awake when the sun rose the next day and he could hear the army preparing itself for the march.
"How much longer?" he asked Tuesday once they were on the road again.
"Don't ask me."
"Then ask one of the boys."
"They're not talking to me."
He raised an eyebrows. "Oh?"
"They want me to make a choice."
"So make a choice."
She walked down Red's neck and glared up at him. "A choice? Between them? Have you taken a good look at them lately?"
He smiled. "I thought you were smitten."
"It was the heat of the moment. Besides, they don't even know what steak is."
He petted her, soothed her, and decided that he would know when he got there where he was going. He didn't even mind when she told him, in detail, about the gophers who had joined them sometime during the night, though he was definitely tempted to ask about the kilts they were wearing.
And just before the sun dropped below the theoretical rim of the world, he saw a jumble of boulders, and the flickering lights of a thousand campfires lining the horizon.
A voice called his name.
A look back showed him Chute running toward the front, hair flying, clothes flying, his sword in one hand as if he were expecting one of the canaries to attack him. Red slowed, and Gideon smiled.
"Quite a group back there," he said.
"Easy for you to say," Chute grumbled. "You don't have all that dust and sweat straightening your curls."
Gideon wanted to suggest that the times had produced what he thought were probably more important things to worry about, but refrained when the man pointed toward the boulders.
"Ivy," he said breathlessly.
Ah, Gideon thought; the main camp. The end of the trail. The beginning of the battle. The source of my discontent, and my heart's unrequited aching.
"Boy," Chute continued, "am I in big trouble."
CHAPTER TEN
At a command from Chute, passed along by Morj and elaborated by York, Gideon's troops broke ranks and dispersed over the crowded plain, finding their places among others of their kind. The boulders, Gideon realized, were not rocks at all but massive tents of hide and leather, and the campfires were so numerous that the light was bright enough to remind one of noon. The noise was considerable—singing, laughing, arguing, philosophizing, walking, running, bleating, shouting, snoring, weeping, l
amenting, rejoicing, ordering, complying—and the smells of the cooking, the sweating, the animals, the people, the tents, the weapons, and the extraordinary sewage facilities was enough to keep him on the lorra's back where he could hold on with both hands whenever he felt himself growing dizzy. Which happened quite often, and especially when he passed an area devoted to what sounded like hysterical centipedes laden with steel castanets.
Red took it all in long, hasty strides.
Gideon decided he'd best make his way to Ivy's placement, and began a wandering through the deepening twilight that took him past creatures he thought really ought to be in the Wamchu's service, not here. But he was, all in all, proud of himself for not staring too long, neither at the man who looked perfectly normal except for the beards that seemed to have a life of their own, nor at the men who didn't look normal at all for reasons he couldn't put his finger on and wasn't about to just to satisfy his curiosity.
An hour passed. And yet another.
Red began to snort about the condition of his feet.
Gideon wanted to complain about the condition of his still-healing buttocks, but couldn't find a tasteful way to put it so that the lorra wouldn't dump him to the ground.
Finally, as he despaired at ever finding her, or knowing the sweet scent of fresh air again, he spotted a large tent off to his left. A red tent. A bubble-shaped red tent topped with a dozen flags, none of whose elaborate designs meant a thing to him, and around which was stationed a platoon of those maybe-normal men carrying perhaps-normal swords and standing behind undecorated shields crossed with heavy bands of what might have been black leather. There was no question that this was Ivy's headquarters, and as Gideon slid off Red's back with a groan, his identification was confirmed when Chute burst from the opening in its center, fell to the ground, got up, blew a curl from his eye, and let his shoulders sag in humiliation.
"Trouble?" Gideon asked when he reached him.
The man sighed. "You were supposed to come with me when I reported to her."
"You didn't tell me. Sony."
"Don't be sorry. York didn't tell me, either."
"Did you tell her that?"
"Of course I did," Chute snapped. "But when you're groveling it's terribly hard to be sincere. She didn't believe me."
A woman's voice rose in harsh anger from within, and a moment afterward, Morj spilled out onto the ground, slapped a hand on a sleeve that tried to make a break for it under cover of dark, and swore. When he rose, he saw Gideon and drew his dagger.
"You were supposed to come with us," he snarled.
"I already told him that," said Chute. "But he wasn't to know, was he? I mean, York didn't tell me, did he? He didn't even tell you, did he? So how was Gideon to know?"
Morj created an instant mythology of curses and stomped off, while Chute suggested that Gideon make an appearance without delay, if only to save the nervous hides of two very dismal young soldiers.
Gideon didn't move.
He couldn't move.
After all this time, this was the moment he'd been waiting for, planning for, hoping for—and he had no idea what he was going to say, do, or otherwise comport himself when he first saw the woman who had taken over his dreams when he wasn't dreaming about getting the hell back to New Jersey. Red, sensing his dilemma, purred for a second before placing his forehead against Gideon's back and nudging him gently forward.
"No," he protested. "No, wait a minute, okay? I've got to think first, Red. This isn't—"
The nudge became a push.
Gideon's heels created shallow trenches in the earth. "I really do think we ought to—"
The push became a shove.
A rather decent shove, considering the way Gideon's heels had gone from trenches to ditches, and he stumbled across the threshold, righted himself with as much dignity as he could find, and waited until his eyes adjusted to the dim lantern-light.
And there she was.
Standing in the middle of the hard-packed earthen floor, alone, staring at him with wide eyes and twitching fingers.
Ivy Pholler.
Blonde, a bit shorter than he, emerald eyes dark in the flickering light. She wore her people's traditional leather-like trousers and a puffy white blouse, neither of which did absolutely anything to conceal the figure he had come so close to examining on a person-to-person basis in the past. So close, and yet so far.
Ivy Pholler.
Queen of his emotions so embroiled in fervent turmoil.
Dear, sweet Ivy, with a dagger in her hand.
—|—
"Well," she said.
He smiled and took a step forward. And stopped when she aimed the dagger somewhere in the vicinity of his midsection. His midsection tightened.
"You've been gone a long time," she told him in a curiously toneless voice, while the dagger beckoned him forward.
He didn't know what to say. This was not exactly the reception he had hoped for, though he understood perfectly how she might be annoyed at his delay in returning to the Upper Ground. After all, their parting had been a poignant one, and his emotions at the time somewhat muddled, since he wasn't sure how he felt about either his position in this strange new world or the people living it. Much, he thought, the same as his confusion now, only more so because, at last seeing her, he wasn't sure that seeing her in his imagination wasn't better; at least there she wasn't poking a really ugly blade toward his vitals, not to mention the general areas of his others.
"It's a long story," he said.
"It better be," she told him. "If you've just been screwing around all this time, you're in big trouble."
He smiled bravely.
She returned the smile, sweetly, and motioned him to a fluffy upholstered camp chair. He sat. She sat opposite him, a firepit between. She put the dagger aside and pulled across her shoulder a long blonde braid intricately entwined with ribbons of such vibrant color that they were difficult to look upon without one's eyes beginning to water.
"You look lovely," he said truthfully, and not a little wistfully.
"The story," she said.
"Tuesday is still a duck."
She blinked only once, slowly. "Whale?"
"Can't find the right touch."
"It's tough being a duck, I guess."
"It's tough being a general too, I'd imagine."
She looked into the fire and nodded solemnly. "It's a bitch, all right. Especially when you keep losing."
Gideon suppressed with some difficulty the urge to leap into her arms and comfort her. Instead, he leaned back, crossed his legs at the ankles, and told her over the period of the next three hours what had passed since they had last saved the world from a fate worse than free enterprise and the occasional band of unsavory raiders. And when he was finished, he waited for her reaction. And waited a while longer while she picked up the dagger, threw it point first into the dirt floor, picked it up and threw it again.
"You didn't write," she said at last.
"Write?" He sat up abruptly. "Write? Jesus, Ivy, didn't you hear me? I was dodging giants, angry Wamchu wives, spider things that dripped disgusting stuff from their mouths, dragons that honest-to-god breathed fire, things in water that had spines like spears... write? When the hell did I have time to write, for god's sake!" He stood, sat immediately down when she threw the dagger between his feet, and looked to the ceiling. "I thought about you a lot, though."
She nodded. "Maybe, but you still have your clothes on."
"I what?"
"I said, you still have your clothes on. If you loved me, you'd tear off your clothes, leap across the fire, tear off my clothes, and ravish me on the spot."
"What spot?"
She pointed to a black spot on the ground beside her chair.
Apprehensively, he glanced at the entrance, and saw that someone had closed the flaps in a gesture of genteel military propriety; he glanced around the tent itself and saw no one lurking behind the chests, the chairs, the tables, the piles of weapon
s and other accoutrements of struggle the leader didn't trust in the hands of the troops.
"Well..."
"Quiet," she said. "I'm going to think."
He didn't like the sound of that. The last time he recalled her thinking was just before she defeated a Moglar force virtually single-handed.
She stood, walked slowly around the firepit, and positioned herself just behind him, humming tunelessly. He tensed. Her hands dropped to his shoulders and began massaging them. He relaxed. The humming stopped. The hands moved to the sides of his neck, and he tensed again.
"Do you remember," she said, "that night just before we fell off the edge of the world? I was going to take my clothes off for you, you know."
He remembered; he knew.
"That was silly of me."
It wasn't; he remembered.
"I'm different now, Gideon. I'm not the same woman you used to know."
Damn, he thought.
"I've learned a lot of things since then. I'm responsible for a lot of people, and not just those who are camped outside, just waiting for the word to march to their possible destruction. Villages and towns all over the world are depending on me to save them once and for all." She sighed, and he squirmed at the hot breath that swept like a moist caress across his nape. "It's a terrible thing, Gideon my dear, having all those people looking up to you, especially when most of them are a good foot taller. It's a bitch."
He patted her hand; she slapped his fingers.
"Gideon..." She swung around and dropped adroitly and not very lightly into his lap. "The battle will be joined soon," she said somberly, her eyes examining his face, her right hand tracing the line of his jaw. "And I have to admit that I'm a little frightened."
He did his best not to squirm under her weight, enjoying instead the feel of her, the scent of her, the closeness of her as she laid her head on his shoulder for the briefest of moments. With a tentative hand, he put his hand on her hair and stroked it.
"No need to fear," he whispered. "Gideon's here."
"Ah," she said with a rueful smile, "but so is Agnes."
He grunted. "Yes. I heard."
