The Sheri S. Tepper eBook Collection

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Marianne watched as long as she could. For a time the man was agile enough to escape injury. After the Duke broke one of his legs with the bludgeon, however, the contest was less amusing and the crowd began to complain, querulously, like a hive of angry bees. The Queen watched all this with no change of expression. As Marianne turned away, her stomach heaving and the sound of the man’s screams echoing in her ears, a voice spoke from behind her.

  ‘Maiden? Marianne?’

  He stood in the doorway. Someone had opened the grating to let him through. The tattered finery that hung upon him was caked with alley dirt and thrown ordure. His trousers were mere scraps, clinging to his thighs more out of habit than from any sensible continuity of fabric. His feet were wrapped in scraps of velvet rag, and his shirt was a filthy fiction. She stared, unable to believe him, even while knowing who it must be.

  ‘I could not obtain a map,’ he said with some dignity. ‘So I merely followed the crowds. I’m sorry I’m so late.’

  ‘You’re my champion?’ she asked, breaking into hysterical giggles. ‘The man who will fight for me? Prince Charming?’

  Something in his face stilled her helpless merriment. It was stern, hard, aching and yet determined. He crossed the room and stared through the window she had just left.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘That’s what Madame has waiting for us.’

  ‘You can’t fight it,’ she told him. ‘No one can.’

  Across the cell a yellow puppy slid between two stones to sit panting on the floor.

  ‘If we can’t fight it, we have to escape it,’ he told her. ‘You hear me, Fair Lady!’

  The thing inside Marianne heaved. She retched with motion sickness as her interior landscape trembled.

  ‘A nice trick that would be,’ she said with a sick, feeble giggle, tears running down her face. ‘Maybe it will kill us quickly.’

  ‘Not on your life it won’t,’ he said. ‘Maiden! Listen to me. We have to find a way out!’

  ‘If we just lie down. Put our heads down. Don’t move, no matter how much it hurts us…’

  He came to her, the strength of him pouring before him like a palpable cloud. He took her in his arms as though it were a ritual and pressed his lips to hers. She could not move, could not breathe. She wanted to thrust him away but more than that to lose herself in that embrace and never come out of it. The thing inside her heaved again, and again, higher and higher, breaking upward through all the strata that had overlaid it, all the time, the endless time…

  ‘My Prince!’ cried Marianne, who had been sleeping for about ten years.

  ‘Who are you?’ cried Marianne at once and in the same voice. Something besides herself occupied her mind.

  ‘Beloved,’ Prince Charming cried, exultantly. ‘Sleeping Beauty. My own!’

  ‘Where?’ Marianne asked, staring around herself at the stone walls, cocking her head at the screams of the crowd. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘We are ensorceled, enchanted, girded about with foul machination,’ he said. ‘In about five minutes, they’ll kill us – you and me. There should be some way to escape. All ensorcelments have escape hatches…’

  Behind them, a blue dog slipped into the cell, closely followed by a silver one.

  ‘What’s going on?’ begged Marianne. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘Shh, shh,’ said Marianne. ‘Be still. Let me see what you know.’ There was another of those seasick heavings, and Marianne felt her body move, without her volition, to the barred gate. ‘Oh, Gods of Creation, what monster is that?’

  ‘A very horrid one,’ he answered. ‘A crippled thing in both mind and body, given the wherewithal to accomplish its foul purposes despite its limitations.’

  ‘We can’t fight him.’

  ‘Not conceivably.’

  ‘We must find a way out.’

  A black puppy slipped into the room, a red one close behind him, and with a rending shudder, the hoof and leg of a horse reached through just behind them.

  ‘Oh, most elevated and supreme Prince, most lovely Lady, guidance!’ whinnied a pathetic voice. ‘I am lost among the stones, tracking these wee doglings, and cannot find my way.’

  ‘Who is that?’ The Prince turned toward the wall. ‘Who calls my name?’

  ‘Your faithful steed, left behind in the void, oh, Prince. Shout again, and I will follow the sound of your voice.’

  The red dog disappeared into the stone, and the other front leg of the horse emerged, along with its nose. The black dog leapt up, seized the bridle, and tugged the horse forward. It nodded its head and neighed gratefully as the last of its tail came through the stone, then turned confidentially to Marianne. ‘Lovely Lady, though I would walk through hell for the privilege of your company, I had not thought to make such a trip as that.’ He turned his massive head as though to look at himself. He was a ponderous gray Shire horse, feather-footed and muscular, his back a veritable field on which a high saddle sat like a minaret, garlanded about with weapons.

  ‘My steed?’ asked the Prince, uncertainly. ‘The fortune-teller did tell me to expect a horse.’

  ‘Obviously,’ said the horse. ‘What good is a Prince Charming without his faithful horse?’

  The five dogs sat down in a row and regarded Marianne with a mixture of skepticism and concern. They had grown considerably since she had seen them last.

  ‘Are you really my doggies?’ she asked at last, the words scarcely out of her mouth before someone else inside her used her mouth to ask quite another question.

  ‘Haven’t we met before?’

  Black Dog panted, nodding. ‘Elsewhere, Marianne. And in another time.’

  Red Dog nodded assent. ‘An evil place, this. We find ourselves very limited in what we can do to assist you.’

  ‘Would your limitations extend to getting us out of here?’ Prince Charming asked, his eyes fixed on the royal box where the Queen seemed about to make an announcement.

  ‘There is an available nexus, yes,’ said Black Dog. ‘One. We know the momeg who holds a locus upon it, one Gojam, and he would be happy to let us through. His locus is, however, in an unfortunate juxtaposition relative to certain other material manifestations.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ The Prince wrinkled his brow and rubbed his forehead while Marianne engaged in an internal colloquy between herselves. ‘You propose a way out? But say it is in an unfortunate place?’

  ‘The spatial location to which we refer is out in the arena. Right in the middle. Under him,’ said the momeg, pointing with one paw at the Duke of Eyes. ‘Immediately under him. If you can get us all out there in the middle, Prince, I think we may be able to do something…’

  In the arena the Duke of Eyes rumbled to and fro over the bloodstained patch of sand that had been his earlier opponent. Though he moved backward and forward and from side to side, he stayed generally in the center of the area in order to permit the audience the best possible unobstructed view. The Duke seemed to enjoy the sound of his treads, a rhythmic clumpety-wump-de-clangedy-wham which filled the blind-walled chasm with thundering echoes. This clattering stopped briefly as the Queen rose to her feet. Her voice filled the stadium, seeming to need no artificial amplification.

  ‘Loyal citizens,’ she cried. ‘For your delectation, we will now have a trial by combat. Just Marianne, guilty of receiving goods stolen from the palace – the evidence is there, before you,’ she made two dramatic gestures, first toward a litter being carried around the arena on which the five gemmed crowns rested, then toward the barred gate. ‘Represented by her champion, Prince Charming!’

  The grating flew upward and two guardsmen entered to escort the Prince into the arena. He, however, had already leapt upon his horse and, heaving Marianne up behind him, he shouted a battle cry and thundered into the fray. The momegs, after only a moment’s hesitation, pattered after him.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ the horse asked in an interested tone. ‘Do you have anything specific in mind?’

  ‘Get hi
m over to one edge,’ gritted the Prince. ‘Away from the middle. Then get ourselves and the dogs into the middle.’

  ‘An excellent plan, though somewhat easier said than done,’ murmured the horse, sidestepping in a set of immaculately executed dressage steps to avoid a tentacle thrust forward by the Duke of Eyes. Momentarily, they were out of the Duke’s vision and the crowd cheered.

  ‘Seven to two on the Duke,’ cried a hawker. ‘Seven to two on the Duke.’

  ‘Ooooh, Marianne,’ squealed a clutch of colosseum groupies. ‘Ooooh, Prince Charming.’ They tossed circlets of flowers which fell around the Prince’s head and over the horse’s ears, blinding them both. ‘Ooooh, Hooray for the Duke.’

  One set of tracks thundered forward, the other back, as the Duke of Eyes rotated to keep them in view. From his central position, it was obvious that the tentacles could reach almost to the arena walls. ‘Damn little maneuvering room, if you’ve noticed,’ the horse whinnied, shaking a flower circlet into his mouth and mumbling around a crisp mouthful of carnations. ‘Shouldn’t you be doing something with that battle axe or that shield or something?’

  ‘Oh, of course,’ said the Prince, startled. He seized the battle axe and got the shield over one arm just in time to block a sword-bearing tentacle that the Duke lashed at them from behind his left shoulder. The Duke snarled, a metallic growl, twisting his flame-thrower-tentacle toward them. Before it could be brought to bear, both the Black and the Foo Dogs scampered wildly across the arena before the machine, leapt onto the right-hand tread and, running the great treadmill madly on three legs, raised their left hind legs to pee industriously into the gears and linkages. Meantime, the faithful horse had raised himself on his hind legs into a wide, hopping turn that let him pound away in the opposite direction before the flame thrower could be readied for use.

  ‘Got to get him out of the middle,’ panted Prince Charming. ‘Got to give him some bait!’

  ‘Me,’ breathed Marianne. ‘Me?’

  ‘Me, I’d rather thought,’ he replied. ‘I’ll slide off. You get forward in the saddle here and hang on. When the thing comes after me, if it does, get behind him in the middle out there with the dogs. Got that?’

  ‘But what about you?’ Marianne wailed ‘What about you!’

  ‘I’ll have to run for it,’ he said grimly, sliding off the wall side of the horse, shield at the ready and battle axe in hand.

  Horse and Marianne circled counter-clockwise. The Duke of Eyes stopped rotating and concentrated on Prince Charming, now huddled under his shield at the arena wall as though in a state of paralysis. The crowd was on its feet cheering, throwing popcorn, and releasing clouds of brightly colored balloons. The Queen was smiling widely, in very good temper, and now nodded magnanimously, signalling her champion to close in for the kill.

  ‘Twelve to one on the Duke,’ the hawker cried. ‘Get yer bets down. Twelve to one on the Duke.’

  Whatever victims the Duke had met in the past, he was not accustomed to meeting armed opponents. He lashed out clumsily with the flame thrower in an attempt to knock the shield to one side. The Prince jumped high, thrust down with the shield to catch the tentacle beneath it, then cut it through with a mighty swing of the axe while the crowd cheered.

  The Queen frowned.

  The cheering stopped as though cut off by a knife. The crowd murmured disapprobation. ‘Foul,’ several sycophantic voices called. ‘Foul.’

  ‘Five to one on the Duke,’ the hawker cried again. ‘Five to one on the Duke.’

  The Prince retreated behind his shield once more and circled. The Duke’s remaining weapons could not be used at a distance. The mighty treads began to revolve, shrieking as they did so. That same flowering rust that had bloomed on everything metal in the city now bloomed on the gears that moved the great treads. Swiveling and lurching, the Duke scrabbled toward the Prince crabwise, each movement accompanied by an ear-shattering shriek of corroding metal.

  Behind the Duke, the horse and Marianne moved on tiptoe toward the center of the arena, dogs at either side.

  Prince Charming stuck his head up from behind the shield to stick out his tongue at the Duke. ‘The Queen is a coprophagist,’ he cried in a stentorian voice. ‘She’s got steatopygia and her eyes are crossed!’

  The Queen scowled. The crowd sat down, huddling in their thousands, making no sound.

  ‘Nyaa, nyaa, nyaa,’ cried the Prince. ‘Old metal guts, afraid to fight.’

  The Queen snarled and gestured: Forward!

  The Duke of Eyes extended all remaining tentacles and lunged, only to find himself skidding wildly to the right because of the rust that had largely immobilized one tread.

  From behind the mechanical monster, the Black Dog barked wildly. ‘Now, Prince. Here, Prince, here, Prince, here!’

  Prince Charming dropped shield and axe and ran for his life. Behind the Duke of Eyes the horse began to occult, winking in and out of existence, each time longer between reappearances. The momegs, too, began to wink. The crowd rose to its feet, screaming. The Queen made an imperious gesture, and the great machine lifted and turned, ponderously creaking and screaming, even as Prince Charming threw himself across the last few feet to the center of the arena and caught the momentarily visible horse around one rear leg.

  Then they were gone.

  With a scream of rage, the Queen turned and stormed out of the arena. With a clatter of treads, the Duke of Eyes wobbled through the great, timbered door. Later the people of whatever-city-it-was commented upon the strange lights that moved all night in the high, private wing of the palace.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Slick as a frog’s back, clay-gray, the flats stretched from under the wagon wheels in all directions to the veiled horizon. Water covered most of it, a mere sheen of moisture licking at mud edges, flattening the hollows, leaving only a narrowly wandering track above the waterline to glimmer like light on wet silk, an uncertain highway from somewhere to anywhere. Tracks came spinning endlessly off the wheels and meandered across the flats until they vanished into misty distance, the net result of all peregrinations yielding no particular direction. Four dogs, red and blue, gray and yellow, bent to the traces, following the black lead dog as he tracked the ridge to leave their paw, wheel and hoof prints in the firmly silted sand. It was forever from where they were to where the tracks vanished in mist. An equivalent featureless distance lay on every hand.

  At times the drier ground split into two or three branches, making the lead dog whine with frustration until the momeg, Gojam, flicked the whip in one direction or another to indicate the chosen route. Nothing differentiated the choices. There was always as much water on one hand as on the other; there was always an equivalency of mud, a sufficiency of glimmer, shine, vapor, colorlessness, sourceless, shadowless light.

  ‘A dull world,’ said Gojam to no one in particular, ‘yet one I have always favored.’

  ‘These are tidal flats, aren’t they?’ asked Prince Charming.

  ‘So I have always believed,’ Gojam replied with a polite smile that showed his pointed teeth and crinkled several of his red little eyes.

  ‘Then the tide ought to—come in, oughtn’t it? At some time?’

  ‘So I would suppose. Though I have never seen it do so.’

  ‘You come here often?’

  ‘When it seems appropriate.’

  ‘May one ask,’ whinnied the horse from his position at the rear of the wagon, ‘what made it seem appropriate on this occasion?’

  ‘Well,’ Gojam mused for a moment, his dewlaps quivering and his long, pendant ears swaying to and fro with the power of his concentration. ‘Firstly, it isn’t inimical. I mean, you can all breathe here, and the temperature isn’t unbearable. Secondly, it’s a placid sort of place. Very little happens. At least, very little has happened when I’ve been here in the past. I thought that would give you all time to collect yourselves, as it were…’

  ‘Very kind of you,’ murmured Marianne, wondering if her tenant,
Marianne, would interrupt her in mid-speech. ‘I, for one, could stand a little collecting.’

  ‘And, thirdly,’ the momeg continued, ‘I doubt that half a dozen momegs in the universe know about this place. Which means that though the dark woman, the Queen, Madame Delubovoska, will probably track you here eventually, it isn’t likely to be a place she’ll look for you right away.’

  ‘Madame Delubovoska,’ mused the Prince. ‘That was the woman who was attempting to kill us, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I believe so,’ offered Gojam. ‘Switching nexi is a strain, and you may have forgotten. Let me take the liberty of reminding you. You were engaged in battle with a large, mechanical monster. Does that ring a bell? Ah, good. Your momeg friends approached me for a means of escape? Ah, you do recall.’

  ‘I remember that,’ said the Prince. ‘I went there to rescue a Fair Maiden – my own true love,’ he cast Marianne a melting glance, ‘but how I got there I really can’t recollect.’

  The lead dog stopped, abruptly, making the other four dogs pile up in the traces with muttered growls. ‘Something,’ the Black Dog said. ‘Out there on the mud.’

  They stared in the direction the dog’s muzzle pointed, seeing nothing at first, then a tiny interruption in nothing, and finally, protruding above the water, two miniscule pimples that had attracted the dog’s attention. The pimples blinked and disappeared, only to appear again, slightly to the right of their previous location.

  ‘Eyes,’ said Marianne. ‘Something with eyes.’

  The eyes regarded them balefully from the level of the water’s surface before disappearing again. They might have been something quite small, close up, or something quite large, far away.

  ‘I had no idea anything lived here,’ Gojam remarked, scratching at a left ear with one pair of arms while twitching the reins with another. ‘Of course, I haven’t come here that frequently.’

  ‘About the tide,’ said the Prince, moodily attempting to pull two scraps of trouser together to cover an expanse of muscular thigh. ‘Reason would indicate it must come in at some time or other.’