by Lionel Fenn
"She's annoyed."
"I heard that too."
"She wants you, you know. As a present to herself."
His eyes widened briefly. "A present? What is it, her birthday?"
Ivy squirmed to settle a bit more; Gideon squirmed, unsettled. "Not exactly. It's her Day."
"Oh," he said.
"You don't know?" She leaned away from him, the better to look into his face. "You really don't know?"
Patience, he figured, had already made him the most virtuous man on the face of whatever planet he thought he was on. "No," he said. "I do not know. But you're going to tell me, and ruin my homecoming, right?"
"It is," she said seriously, "the celebration of the moment a woman realizes that she is not simply chattel, nor ass, nor slave to the universe. It is," she said more loudly, "that moment when a woman discovers within herself the power, the force, the invincible and unalterable magna-energy that permits her, above all others except other women, to control, define, and shape her future without the sullying influence of outside distractions."
She paused to catch her breath.
"It happens once every two hundred and twenty-nine years."
Gideon computed rapidly. "But that means—"
"Right. Unless you live to be about three or four hundred, you'd better have a good time when it happens."
And Agnes, he thought then, must be—
"Two hundred and twenty-nine," Ivy said.
"Jesus."
"On that day, Gideon, she will be the most powerful being in the entire cosmos. So you can see why I'm frightened. And who knows?" she added in a husky whisper. "I may never come back."
"No," he protested. "Don't say that, Ivy. You will. We both will."
"Perhaps. Perhaps not." She wriggled a little to make herself more comfortable, and pressed closer, her eyes half-lidded and her mouth not an inch from his. "But I do know that there may not be a tomorrow."
He thought about mortality, and about the impression she was making on his road-dusty jeans. "True. One never knows about these things."
"Tonight may be all that we have left."
Her left hand toyed with the buttons of her blouse.
"True," he said again with a heavy sigh. "No one can predict the future, not in perilous times such as these."
"Then..." She backed away, looked away, gave him her profile highlighted and made honey by the dancing flames. "Then we shouldn't waste it, Gideon. We shouldn't throw away these last precious minutes Fate has been kind enough to throw in our direction."
"You're right."
Slowly, her face turned toward him; slowly, she took his hand and brought it close to her breast. "At any moment, the Wamchu's personal nightmares, allied with his personal hideous forces, may come crashing through this very tent and steal whatever future we might have together."
"God, are you right!"
"Yes," she said sadly. "I wish I weren't, but I am."
His palm began to strain toward its destination, though no more so than the fabric of his jeans. "We must—"
"Yes," she whispered. "Yes, I know." Her lower lip trembled; her eyelids closed halfway; her breath caught and held in her lungs.
"Ivy, we've got to do something," he exclaimed.
"And about time, too," she said.
"We have to make plans," he said anxiously. "I still don't know all that's going on around here."
She looked at him for a very long time. "No kidding," she said at last.
He looked at her, looked at his hand that was suddenly flung into his lap, looked at her hand working deftly on the buttons of her blouse, and reeled from the emotional implications that struck him like a brick.
"Jesus," he said.
"Gideon, you are absolutely the most..." She flipped the braid back over her shoulder, nearly taking his chin off in the process, and straightened her shoulders, which managed in otherworldly contortions to take swift care of the rest of the buttons. "You are..."
"Yes, I know," he said glumly. "I'm a fool, a jerk, a sad sack, a dreamer, a miserable and low-down dirty rat who doesn't deserve to walk in your footsteps or crawl in your wake or touch the hem of your gown or—"
Her exasperated scream was probably not heard beyond the reach of the fire, but it was enough to deafen him, and enough to make him gape when she grabbed his ears and slammed his face into her bosom; a rather nice bosom for all that it was suffocating him, he thought, and one that he supposed he might well be able to get used to if it weren't being used as a most unusual, albeit effective, weapon against his stupidity. Unless, he thought further, it wasn't being used as a weapon at all, but rather as a method of womanly comfort for his troubled soul and his meekness in accepting his destiny. Of course, it might also, when one thought about it long enough and depending on how long one could hold one's breath, be part of a plan she had to seduce him.
He smiled.
He sighed.
He accepted his subordinate position and would have attempted to elaborate on it had he not been unable to get his hands free, and had there not been a knock on the tent's flap.
Ivy froze, scowled over her shoulder and told whoever it was to get the hell out because she was in strategic conference with the man who had traveled the length and height of the world to reach her side in order to assist her in her fight for the freedom of her people.
Whoever it was paused, then knocked again.
"I don't believe it," she said, slipping off his lap and rebuttoning her blouse. "I really don't believe it."
Gideon, deciding it would be better if he remained in his chair, crossed his legs at the knees with some difficulty and envied his cheeks their brush with immortality. Then he stood up anyway when Chute, Morj, and York marched into the tent, saluted Ivy, snarled at him, and announced just this side of primness that there seemed to be something wrong with the sky.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Ivy found it difficult to keep the scorn and distaste from her voice. "What? You dare interrupt me for a story like that, at a time like this? Are you nuts?"
York stepped forward with a flourish of hair and sword. "We are only doing our duty," he said stiffly. "We saw something we thought you ought to know about, and we could not shirk our responsibility."
Gideon thought it best to stay out of it, especially when the Vondels looked at him as one and as much as told him with their narrow-eyed expressions that they would cut off his head if he so much as opened his mouth.
Ivy did not miss the moment. "York," she said.
York looked back at her. He smiled. The others smiled too, but they kept looking at Gideon.
"So tell me again. What's going on?"
"The sky," he said. "There is something amiss with the sky."
"Where?" she demanded.
"There," Chute said, pointing upward.
At a nod from Ivy, Gideon hurried to the entrance, drew back the flap, and looked up. At first, he saw nothing out of the ordinary; then he took several steps away from headquarters, and noticed that the stars he had seen earlier were not as numerous, nor were they as luminous. At the same time, he was able to detect a faint leathery sound up there, much like the slow flap of many wings that had been somehow muffled.
And as he frowned in puzzlement, he realized that the sky was not the only area that exhibited a certain amount of irregularity more than the usual irregularity which he was, god help him, getting used to.
The encampment, much to his astonishment and unease, had fallen completely silent. The songs had been sung, the chatter silenced, and he knew instinctively that all the men and whatevers around him were not simply asleep.
The feeling he had now was one of an intensive collective listening.
And many of the fires had been extinguished, bringing to bear the full impression of a night soon to be shattered.
Chute came out and stood beside him. "Boy, are you in trouble."
"Not me," he said, still looking up. "Ivy and I got along just fine."
"With York, I mean," the man said. "He thinks you two were having close consultation in there of a kind we never learned in boot camp."
Gideon couldn't help staring at him. "You were in boot camp?"
Chute nodded, and lifted one leg. "Sure. You think you buy these things just anywhere?"
The leathery-winged sounds grew louder, and on the fringes of the camp they could hear animals screaming prescient warnings of doom on the wing.
"So," Chute said, polishing his dagger on his sleeve. "Were you, or what?"
"Was I what?" he answered, squinting at the stars that were fading even more.
"Consulting."
"None of your business," he said absently.
"Morj won't like that."
"I think—" Gideon began, and decided instead to return to the tent, where he found York and Morj dueling silently in the corner. Ivy, ignoring them completely, was strapping on a belt from which dangled various sheaths and scabbards and pouches; when she saw him, she blew him a kiss and said, "The time has come to show me what you can do."
"Here?" he said.
"No, there," she said, pointing to the flaps.
"But there's people out there!"
"So? You think you can shadowbox out of this war, or what?"
Suddenly the leathery sounds increased dramatically, to a great flapping roar that deafened all who heard it; and before anyone could react, the roof of the tent was torn to shreds, and great, leathery bird-things dropped to the ground. There was no time to think, only to react.
Morj yelled a terrified warning; York spun around and pinked one of the attackers on its fleshy, disjointed beak; and Chute blew a curl out of his eye just as another leathery thing landed with a bird-like chortle, swiped him with a wing and sent him pinwheeling through the tent's wall.
Gideon, bat in hand and praying for divine intervention, battered the spine of one creature, dented the kneecap of another too slow to move out of the way, and charged to Ivy's side just as she was snared by a pair of filthy-looking talons that hadn't been trimmed since Wamchu was a baby. He brought the bat down on the thing's wing, and it screamed, released her, and swung its green-feathered, topknotted head like a ram into his chest. He gasped and fell to the ground, scrambled to his feet again and aimed for the other wing as it grabbed Ivy a second time. It screamed and swung its head around, ramming his chest and tumbling him into a chair, which broke when he landed on it and flung him sprawling to the ground. He leapt to his feet, sideswiped with the bat a creature that was snipping the curls from York's brow, and threw himself with a vengeance on the thing that a third time grabbed Ivy in its talons.
The din was horrid.
The smell was overpowering.
When the leathery thing ducked away from Gideon's charge, he dove for Ivy, grabbed her foot, and fell backward when her boot slipped off, leaving him nothing but laces to remember her by. With an animalistic growl he tossed the footgear aside, got to his feet, but was too late to stop the thing that held Ivy from tossing her in a perfect spiral to another thing, which snatched her out of the air with a deftness that belied its clumsy appearance. Gideon swerved to intercept her, but was tripped when Chute climbed back into the tent and was knocked aside by an errant but earnest tailfeather.
He called out.
Ivy swore.
He sprang to his feet and swung the bat wildly over his head. But it missed the leathery flying thing, which launched itself with a harsh, laughing shriek through the tent's rent roof and vanished triumphantly into the night. As if that were a signal, the others left as well, either flying or running, depending upon their condition so long as it wasn't dead, and within moments the four men were left alone amid the devastation.
"Boy," Chute said, "are we in trouble now."
"Speak for yourself," Gideon snapped in disgust, and hurried as best he could into the open. His ribs ached, his left leg felt as if it had been pulled from his hip, and his right eye was watering fiercely. Yet he was still able to spot Ivy, up there, kicking and screaming as she was carried away toward the black of the horizon, and parts unknown.
Helplessly, he waved his impotent bat in the creature's direction, and just as helplessly watched as it outlined itself cleverly against the full of the moon and made sure he was able to see his love's dangling figure—still now, limp, little more than a speck, a mote, a twisted black extension of the thing's black and twisted talons.
Shit, he thought, and slammed the bat at the ground, opening up a hole into which York fell when he raced out, over which Morj leapt agilely, and into which Chute stared.
"Trouble," the man said. "You really love trouble, don't you?"
—|—
The camp's stillness erupted into turmoil, concern, and unbridled rage.
Once word had spread of the tragic result of the night attack on headquarters, it was all the Vondel brothers could do to prevent the entire army from charging out headlong into the darkness to bring Ivy back. It was impossible, they argued; the creatures had flown away, and there was no telling in what direction they had gone or where they had taken Ivy. Still the troops raged and swore and broke into impromptu mournful song as they wandered from place to place in search of something, anything, to do in order not to think that they might already be defeated before the last battle had even begun.
Gideon wandered as well.
With his gaze on the stars in hope of seeing Ivy one more time, he stumbled through the encampment in a doleful daze, ignoring those who called out his name, brushing aside those who would cling to him for comfort.
Ivy was gone.
And it was all his fault.
Not that he would have been able to drive off all the creatures that had so savagely infiltrated the tent, and not that he would have been able to fling himself on the back of one of the flying things and ridden precariously to the enemy camp and there rescue her in a pyrotechnic blaze of surprise and glory, and not that he would have been able to grab her away from the iron grip of those talons.
No; if he had only resisted her seductive urges, if he had not buried himself so willingly in the admittedly delectable pillows of her arbor, he would have noticed the wing sounds sooner, noticed the quiet that had fallen over the camp, and he would have been ready.
Some hero, he thought sourly; some lousy hero.
He had no idea how much time had passed, or how far he had wandered, but when he next took stock of his surroundings he found himself on the eastern edge of the camp, the last tent behind him, the plain stretching ahead toward the dark line of a stand of trees. Perhaps, he thought, he could go there and hang himself with his bat belt; that would teach him a lesson about alertness and temptation. Perhaps he might even find solace in death, and, with luck, a bit of absolution. Of course, if he were dead, it wouldn't do him much good to know he'd been absolved, but it might count for something if there was anything on the Other Side.
On the other hand, if there was no Other Side, he'd only be dead, and that wouldn't solve anything except the misery of his life.
Slowly, painfully, he lowered himself to the ground, put his hands to his face and suddenly wanted more than anything just to rest, to fall asleep and wake up and find everything the way it once was, the way it should be... the way he wanted it to be, without any of the hassles.
And with his eyes closed, he saw it again—the plain, unbroken to a blood-red horizon under a pale red sky. And the figure he had dreamt of before was nearer now, still dark enough to be featureless, yet close enough for him to know that it was no man who watched him, no man who waited for him, out there, in the wilderness.
He could not see the face.
He knew it was Agnes.
Agnes Wamchu, denizen of the dark, empress of psychic hells, hater of him, and dressed in black silk.
He sensed, suddenly, that she was smiling, a one-sided smile that told him all he needed to know about his future, if he was foolhardy enough to carry on with his task, stupid enough to believe he might actually defeat h
er.
On her Day, when all who were smart and wise would be digging their own graves to save her the trouble.
Damn, he thought; nobody's even bothered to tell me when the hell it is.
His hands dropped quickly, and he blinked to drive the vision away, blinked again and stood, biting his lip against an ache that spread across his ribs.
Chute's right, he thought, there ain't nothing but trouble.
He sighed, turned, and saw Red trotting toward him, and on the lorra's back a young man dressed in rough hides and a black leather vest. For a brief moment a brief smile twitched his lips, and he held out his arms as Tag Kori leapt to the ground and embraced him.
—|—
"I heard you were here," the young man said, almost in tears. "I looked and looked for you; then I saw Red and I asked him to find you."
"I'm glad you did," Gideon said, holding the handsome teenage boy at arm's length and sighing. "I think I was about to talk myself into doing something stupid." They hugged again and patted each other's back in commiseration for their shared sorrow. "I've missed you, lad. I hate to admit it, but I really have missed you."
Tag ducked his head. "Well, I haven't had anyone to save from drowning since you fell into the Rush. It's been kind of boring."
Gideon had to laugh at the memory of their first meeting, and dropped to the ground cross-legged, pulling the boy down beside him. "I guess you've heard."
Tag nodded, his thatch of brown hair spilling over his shoulders, his forehead, his ears, his eyes. He didn't seem to notice. He was more concerned with the dust settling on his vest. "Sure did," he said. "So what are you going to do, and can I come with you? I'm good at this, you know. See, the way I figure it, if we don't take the rest of the army with us, we can get a good sneak up on them, then surround them before they know what's happening, and tear off their wings while we get Ivy back, safe and sound."
"Tag, there are only two of us."
"And Red. Don't forget Red."
"Tag, we—"
"So we surround them on three sides instead of four. We can still dismember a few, then burn their castles to the ground and pillage their crops and—"
