“I am,” he cried, “Jad Ben Otho! I am the Great God!"
Kenny snickered, “Jeez, Micky! We all knew you were proud of your dick, from the very first shower in eighth grade gym class, but gawd! Lookit you!"
Micky screamed, “I am Jad Ben Otho!” and stamped his foot, effect ruined because it was soundlessly bare.
I said, “Come on, Desta. We gave up that game a long time ago. Time to be the Assistant Mine Inspector of Aceta now."
“I am so Jad Ben Otho!"
The High Priest raised his dagger on high, blood-red jewel in the center of his forehead glinting dangerously. “Bow down before the Great God!"
I said, “Who the fuck are you supposed to be? Lu-Don of A-Lur?” I was a little surprised I could remember it that well.
Micky laughed a very familiar nasty little laugh. “Fool! Don't you recognize Matai Shang when you see him?"
Matai Shang? “Micky, you're mixed up..."
He lifted his hands then and little crackles of electricity, like slim bolts of real lightning, curled upward, dissipating, leaving behind a burning ozone thunderstorm smell. I felt my hair stir, and thought, This just isn't ... it just isn't...
Micky screamed, “Kill them! Kill them!"
I whispered, “Us? You want them to kill us, Micky? But we're your friends. We've come to save you and..."
The warriors, thousands of warriors, all flashing black obsidian and gorgeous tropical feathers, started up the pyramid stairs, chanting something, I don't know what, in some croaky, creaking alien tongue.
Dah-ee-lah the Untouchable, suddenly naked, stepped before them, arms raised, crying out something equally unknown, maybe in that language we imagined was called Canaanite.
Kenny looked at her, astonished, and said, “That's not right. That's not how it goes.” Then he got out his rapier, en garde once again.
I took my ten-thousandth deep breath of the adventure.
Micky screamed, “Kill them! Now!"
I drew my swords, katana to the right, wakizashi to the left, just as before. All a dream, I told myself. All a dream. They'll hit you over the head again, your nose and ears will bleed, because a dreaming boy with a fractured skull has to account somehow for the headache and...
A long, skeletal shadow loomed over me, a fantastically thin shadow made of dancing feathers and long, angular arms, wavy sacrificial dagger sprouting down from one fist, so obviously aimed at me.
I spun, swinging the katana, even remembering I needed to bring up the wakizashi as well, use it as a shield to ward off the dagger. It's just like those Italian duelists you read about, sword in one hand, knife in the other...
The katana hit Lu-don/Matai Shang where his left shoulder turned up into his neck, and slid at an angle down through his chest, coming out just under the hair of his right armpit, carrying me with it in a long arc of follow-through.
I staggered hard, struggling to keep my footing, realizing if I tripped I'd go bowling down the steep stairs of the pyramid, and be killed by the fall, even if the warriors of the City of Gold didn't get me first.
The high priest broke in two and fell, one part here, one part there, dead on the stairs and already sliding, sacrificial dagger clattering off to one side, breaking into pieces because it was made of brittle white stone. Bright blood boiled up in the air, splashing high, splashing on me, and I briefly saw his heart, bounding away on its own, like a red rubber ball.
“No!” Micky screamed. “He was supposed to kill you! God damn it, Burke, Burke the Jerk! You're spoiling everything! Just like you always do!” It seemed like he was crying now, face twisted with impotent rage, fists clenched, tears flying from his rage-red face in all directions.
And me? I thought, Spoiling everything? Just like I always do?
“It's not fair!” he shouted, “I'm supposed to be Onol of Aceta! I made him up, not you! I get the fucking girl, not you!"
I sat down on the bloody steps, my sword blades clanging on the stone, head spinning, and then, battle raging hopelessly all around me, I leaned forward between my knees and started to puke.
* * * *
It was dark all of a sudden, copper penny moon sailing high in the empty black sky, casting bronzy shadows here and there, dead trees like eldritch magicians posed all around us, motionless, arms on high, frozen in the act of casting one last spell. Dah-ee-lah, naked Dah-ee-lah the Untouchable, was leading me by the hand, up into the hills, away from the City of Gold, leading me away to safety.
Behind us, the City was lit up bloody by firelight, fires whose redness I imagined was fed by real blood, the blood of Lu-don or Matai Shang or whoever he was springing out like an impossible mist when I cut him in two.
Cut him in two!
I sat down suddenly, falling onto a mossy hummock, facing toward the city, hilts of my swords poking me in the ribs, staring back downhill through the branches of the dead forest, back to the City of Gold.
The Pyramid of the Great God was the tallest structure of the City, standing out now as a vast black shadow, tall flames leaping from its summit. Silhouetted against the flames were the leaping black shadows of men, cast our way obviously, but looking ever so much like magic mannequins dancing in the heart of a fire.
I said, “I killed that man. I cut him in half with a sword and he..."
Dah-ee-lah stood close behind me, hands warm on my shoulders, and I realized that little wisp of tickle on the back of my neck had to be her pubic hair brushing my skin.
It made me shiver.
The fire atop the Pyramid leaped suddenly, yellow, brightening as it grew. And Dah-ee-lah said, “Huitzilopochtli hungers."
Another shiver.
I tried hard to remember what'd happened. The roar of the warriors ascending the stairs. Lu-don's shadow. The swing of the sword. The explosion of blood. Micky screaming, rage, disappointment, bare-naked envy. I remembered puking, then nothing more.
I said, “Kenny? Johnny?"
She said, “Adar Thu of Cillpa and Tengam of Alalan?"
“Yes."
“Lost in the battle,” she said.
“Dead?"
“Maybe."
“Oh, God."
She said, “Maybe not."
“You saved me,” I said.
“You saved us both."
“I don't remember."
“Then you weren't meant to."
She led me away then, pulling me to my feet, taking me by the hand, leading me farther up in the hills until the City of Gold was no more than ruddy reflections against the night. When we stopped, there was a little stream gurgling somewhere nearby, and a little hollow where we could camp, protected from the cool wind that'd suddenly sprung up.
Just as well, I thought, as Dah-ee-lah lit another magic fire. Bound to get goosebumps dressed like that.
I'd spent a lot of time the last couple of years thinking about naked women, posing them in my mind, making them show me what I wanted to see, making them do whatever I wanted. I never imagined anything like this.
Before I started hanging around with Micky and Kenny and Johnny, I used to play with a kid named Sandy who lived at the top of our street. Sandy's family seemed different from mine, easier and friendlier, his parents like a couple of overgrown kids themselves, more intent on playing and fun than being adults. They drank, just the way Micky's parents drank, but rather than sitting sullen and red nosed on the porch after supper, they'd howl and chase around until the furniture got tipped over.
Sandy's dad had a workshop in the basement, over by the furnace, and in that dark corner was a wall covered with pictures of naked women, cut from magazines and calendars and such. The women in the pictures stood in stiff poses and leered out at you in a funny way.
And that was all I ever had to go on.
The women in the pictures were naked. Naked as a lie. There was nothing real about them, but I didn't know that.
She stood then and turned, turned toward me, a magical goddess outlined by flames. Dah-ee-lah? Nonsen
se. Dah-ee-lah was just a place marker used out of ignorance in a story written by a boy who knew nothing at all.
Once again, I said, “Who are you really?"
I wasn't expecting an answer, but she said, “I am the magic that turns boy into man, man into beast, beast into angel."
That simple, huh?
The magic itself.
The sublime.
The ridiculous.
All rolled into one.
So I said, “And you? What do you get out of it?"
Ah-hah. The oldest question of all.
She laughed then, and said, “I get that magic moment when the Untouchable becomes the Beloved."
Then she sat down on my knees, facing me, slid ever so close, and kissed me that first real kiss, the one all of us remember so well, that first electric touch.
* * * *
I stood alone, peeing on the base of a dead tree, in the wan gray light just before sunup in the Land Down Under, magic moon having set a few minutes earlier in a now-familiar flash of momentary darkness. I'd walked up here when I awoke, carefully disentangling from the sleeping form of Dah-ee-lah the Beloved, Untouchable no more, looking down at her, still astonished, before wandering away, wondering why I still needed privacy for this.
Because I'm still me?
Surprise, surprise, surprise.
And yet.
The night was no more than a kaleidoscope of shifting images, presenting themselves one by one for my amazed inspection.
How would I feel now, if this had happened in the real world, mundane world, the world of my dull old life? More amazed, because of the juxtaposition? Or less amazed, because of the things that would've had to come before it?
I couldn't imagine Dah-ee-lah as one of the eighth-grade girls I'd known, aged another year or two, and ready for this.
But that has to be what happens, right?
There was a soft rustle off among the trees, as the light continued to brighten and I continued to pee, then Kenny's voice said, “I got away."
It made my belly muscles clench, made me stop peeing abruptly. When I turned to look, he was standing not far away in the lessening gloom, rapier sprouting from his hand, old leather football helmet strapped to his head. There was a big cut in the helmet, leather split to show cotton batting inside. Kenny had a black eye, and a crust of blood blackening one nostril. There was a big bruise on his thigh, too.
“I figured you were dead."
He nodded. “Me too. I tried to keep up with you,” he said, “but you fought like a madman, protecting her, getting her away.” He looked me up and down. “What happened to your clothes?"
I gestured toward the hollow, and said, “I took them off.” I tried hard to remember what he was describing, me, fighting like a madman, but I couldn't.
He stepped that way, craning to see over the rise, evidently seeing enough. “You did it with her, didn't you?"
I looked away and nodded, not wanting to see if he was jealous or not.
After a moment, I heard him whisper, “Fuck...."
Wanting to lighten things up a bit, I laughed softly, and said, “Well, that would be the word you're looking for, all right."
When I looked at him again, he seemed angry, scowling. “These things can't be happening to us. We're thirteen! Little kids.... “Perhaps unsaid: You can't have sex with beautiful girls, can't kill men, cut them in two with a sword....
“Kenny, what is it they make you say at Bar Mitzvah?"
He looked away, mouth twisting. “You were there."
I was, and he'd said the line in English, not just in Hebrew. Today ... Hell, it takes more than years to make a man, and more than just a woman, for that matter. But, even now, especially now, I don't know exactly what it is that does make a man. I said, “Kenny, look at me. Do I look like a little kid to you?"
He looked, looked me up and down, eyes trying to shy away, failing, looking at me after all, just as the sun peeped over the white cliffs, filling the Land Down Under with golden light. “No...” he said. “No. I guess not. You're taller. Thinner and harder looking than you were. And your...” he gestured at my crotch, then looked at my face with a smirk. “Jesus, Alan. I tried not to look at guys in the gym-class shower, you know."
I laughed. “Me too."
American schools have an age-span problem that causes unintended consequences. You're supposed to start first grade when you're six years old, but some parents wait until the kid is seven. Then again, if you turn six by the end of the calendar year, they'll let you in when you're five. Me, Kenny, and Micky were all born late in the year, so only Johnny was fourteen already. Meanwhile, some kids will flunk a year, or even two. So there were boys in that eighth-grade gym class who were already fifteen years old, and looked like they were ready to play for the NFL.
He said, “You still think this is all real?"
I shrugged. “If it is, we've been carried away by the magic. Can you imagine going back now? Waking up and going to school in the fall?"
He shook his head. “So what do we do?"
I gestured toward the crest of the hill. “Go see if Dah-ee-lah is awake, I guess."
“And then?” You could see him wondering what he'd see, when she got out of the green blanket she'd conjured from nowhere at all, the one we'd slept in when what we were doing was over.
I said, “We've got to see about Johnny. And Micky."
That made a shadow go behind his eyes, but he sighed, and said, “I was afraid of that. But ... right."
* * * *
That day Dah-ee-lah the Beloved led us down out of the hills and back to the sea. We'll do what needs to be done, she'd said, when the time comes to do it. I thought to object, to insist we had to go, but ... no way for me to make sense of it, much less insist. It's her world, Kenny said. You need to listen.
So she led me downward, away from the City of Gold, all through that long, golden day. The landscape changed from dead forest to hilly meadow, all green grass, buttercups and white clover, drifts of butterflies, orange, gold, blue, black, scattering before us.
On the beach, we ate our magic supper, while the sun drifted down toward the white cliffs, dimming the way it did, preparing, I suppose, to become the moon, while the blue of the sky deepened. If I looked, I could see the little black hole that led back into the caves, to where we'd found the Chamber of the Dead, back into the tunnels under the mine, back to Dinky's Cliffs and Marumsco Village and the world we'd left behind.
What happens, I wondered, if we scale those cliffs and go back into the darkness?
I saw Kenny looking too, wondering as well, I'm quite sure. Kenny with a home to go to and no Beloved to hold him here.
When he looked at me, I saw it didn't matter. “Funny,” he said. “It's like we never lived there at all."
After dinner, we threw off our clothes and swam naked in the sparkling sea, laughing, playing, not like children, merely like ourselves. We'd fallen into this world in a way I couldn't fathom. Even in a dream, you somehow know it's not real. Things happen that can't happen. There's an air of flatness in a dream, of a world that can be peeled away in an instant. Here and now, the water felt just the way it does when you go to the beach. Only there'd never been such a beach as this, nor ever such a sea.
Afterward, as our featureless metal moon rose in that same starless sky, we made our beds around the fire, Dah-ee-lah and I together, Kenny off on the other side. Giving us privacy, I suppose, for whatever we wanted to do.
In the morning, we swam again in water just cool enough to be refreshing, then put on our clothes and ate a magic breakfast over another magic fire. There was a little mist hanging over the sea, pale and translucent in air grown still for the first time since we'd come here. Suddenly, I missed the soft hiss of the wind in the grass, the rustling in the trees like background music in a movie. This new silence seemed ominous. Or worse.
They came out of the mist as if by prearranged signal, just as breakfast dishes and warm green blankets
were folded away to nothing at all, three low ships rowing in toward the beach, sails furled, so their masts looked like the crosses of Golgotha, oars lifting and dipping gently in the soft blue water.
Funny ships they were, right out of an old book, prows aiming the wrong way, curving forward to cut through the water, big black-and-red eyes painted on either side. Seen head on they looked like three demons about to rise from the waves.
All knowing, as always, Kenny murmured, “Pentekonters."
I said, “Those are Phoenician ships, aren't they?"
“I think so."
Who else went to sea in ships like these? Agamemnon, Odysseus, Hector ... a thousand black ships, headed for Troy.
Dah-ee-lah shouted, once again in that guttural speech we called Canaanite, and a man waved back, from near the bow of the foremost ship. The ships ground into the beach, prows ripping the sand, oars lifting, suddenly vertical, then lowered to the deck and were gone. Where the oars had been, a hundred men stood up in each ship, all of them burned red-brown in the sun, all of them with dense black beards, curly hair shining, as if slick with oil.
I found myself swallowing hard, and thought, I really do need to learn to use these damned swords. What was it Kenny said I did? Something about fighting like a madman? Maybe the madness will come again.
The man who'd waved jumped down into the sea and waded ashore, running to Dah-ee-lah, calling out something in Canaanite or Phoenician or whatever, swept her up in a tight embrace, and I felt my first hard pang of jealousy, felt my hand drift to the sharkskin hilt of the katana. He was tall and tan and muscular, I saw, dressed in a little white skirt like you sometimes see girls wear on American Bandstand, something like a leather safety-patrol belt going diagonal across his chest. I remembered that was called a Sam Browne belt, and realized he looked an awful lot like the illustration of John Carter on the cover of the Ballantine edition of A Princess of Mars.
I heard Kenny say, “Christ. Now what?” There was another man jumping down now, a man just like the first, running up the beach and grabbing her up, as soon as the first one let her go, smothering her in a hug, kissing her right on the lips. I suddenly felt like I would never be able to breath again. I wanted to kill them both, right now, slicing them to bits with katana and wakizashi, but there were other men getting off the ships now. And every one of them seemed to have a short spear in his hand.
Asimov's SF, October-November 2006 Page 33
