The Hero King

by Rick Shelley

  When we finally stopped to camp for the night, I unsaddled Electrum and lightened the load on Geezer, my packhorse. I rubbed both animals down with a worn scrap of blanket, found them grass to graze on, and made sure they had water while a small fire heated my supper and a pot of water. I had hot chocolate instead of coffee for the evening.

  The campsite was a small clearing bounded on three sides by brambles that would keep the horses from wandering. I strung two lengths of rope across the open side and tied the horses to a picket line, double insurance to keep them from wandering off during the night.

  We had ridden through mostly civilized countryside all day, past small villages, through fields that had been harvested many weeks before. No one had challenged us. The few peasants we saw had seemed anxious to avoid close contact.

  We, us. One day on the road and I was already thinking of me and my horses as we. Maybe it was just because I was so used to having other people around. Back in Varay, even in the other world, I usually had to make a special effort to get time alone, do things like go down into the burial crypt at Basil to get completely away from people.

  “We did good today,” I told the horses when I checked on them before I bedded myself down for the night.

  I crawled into my small domed tent, rolled two thermal blankets around me, and slept—no dreams, no alarms. There was simply a blank between closing my eyes and opening them again in the morning, the way sleep should be but so rarely is for me.

  When I woke, just before sunrise, there was a thick layer of frost on the ground outside my tent. I used a can of Sterno to get a fire going to heat my breakfast and more water—this time for instant coffee. I needed a caffeine fix to start me off. I was stiff and sore. Hurrying through the morning routine to get into the saddle as quickly as possible seemed the best remedy.

  The second day and night passed about the same as the first. We crossed out of Xayber’s lands about an hour before sunset. I knew exactly when we passed his border. My danger sense shifted to a fast idle. His people had been instructed to let me pass. He had no control over anyone beyond this boundary. I reined in Electrum and toyed with the idea of camping again on Xayber’s land, putting off the threat of other elflords until the morning of a full day, but I decided to press on that evening as long as we could.

  Time. I couldn’t afford the luxury of wasting riding time for one last night of comparative safety. By the time I finally stopped to camp, we had traveled about ten miles beyond Xayber’s lands.

  I didn’t sleep as soundly that night, but it passed without incident and we got an early start the following morning.

  The heart of Fairy was a lot different from the portions of the Isthmus of Xayber that I had seen during my first foray into the land of the alleged immortals. The isthmus was wild territory, populated mostly by various beasties and wild trolls, patrolled by the armies of the Elflord of Xayber. There had been the swamps and mangled forest, tangled and dripping with danger. But that was all marcher territory, Fairy’s buffer against the buffer zone, like the minefields on the East Berlin side of the Berlin Wall … before the Wall came tumbling down. Deeper inside the territory of the elflords—Xayber and whoever owned the land that I entered after I left Xayber’s demesne—the land looked tamer, little different from land in the seven kingdoms. There were regular roads, fields that had been harvested for food and fodder, vast parklike tracts, and stands of wood that looked as if they were regularly tended and manicured. The place was just dripping in folksy scenes that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Currier and Ives print.

  Wagons loaded with produce moved from village to village, or on to some manor house or castle that I never got close enough to see. The people running the wagons gave me nervous looks—which I imagine I returned fully—but no one challenged me or set my danger sense into convulsions. The two elf swords slung over my shoulders would have stopped any of the common folk from setting at me. Even small bands of soldiers, had I chanced on any, might have been daunted by such evidence of martial prowess … unless they were led by an elf warrior.

  Despite Xayber’s warnings of constant danger once I left his lands, I didn’t have any trouble at all during the first week after I crossed that border. I rode with the sun over my right shoulder in the morning, directly behind me at noon, and over my left shoulder in the afternoon. Past sunset each night, I rode by the light of five silvery moons until I was too tired to go on any longer. The nights got colder, the days started to remain quite chilly. But the skies remained perfectly clear. There was no rain or snow.

  Even the cold got boring.

  My one-sided conversations started to repeat themselves. Memories came and went, and came again, until it seemed that I had reviewed my entire life in more detail than I really wanted. I sang old songs just to break the silence. At times I felt like standing in my stirrups and screaming for somebody to do something, just to break the monotony.

  I wasted a lot of time wondering how much time had passed back in Varay. Nine days in the heart of Fairy might translate to more than three weeks back at Castle Basil, perhaps considerably more. Aaron and Parthet would be examining every bit of news and rumor for new hints of the speed of the general dissolution. Kardeen would have surveyors marking how much the Titans had shrunk since the last measurement. Cooks would continue to crack open eggs with trepidation, wondering if the next one—or the one after that—would hold a tiny dragon. Joy would be worrying. By now, she probably had her fingernails chewed halfway to her knuckles.

  And all I could do was keep riding north, pushing Electrum and Geezer as hard as I could without driving them into the ground, not having the slightest idea just how long a ride we might have. At least Geezer’s load decreased a little with each passing day.

  There were no maps of the farther reaches of Fairy back in Varay. I didn’t even know whose land I was trespassing on after I left Xayber’s demesne. But none of the other elflords seemed disposed to block my progress. There were no questing presences seeking to identify the interloper.

  It was just a matter of time before the Great Earth Mother took note of me, though. I knew that with a surety that didn’t require the occasional tweet of my danger sense.

  Ten days out from Xayber’s land, I reached the end of the civilized regions of Fairy—for all practical purposes, perhaps the end of Fairy itself. I couldn’t be sure exactly what the border meant—Xayber’s explanation hadn’t been as clear as it might have been—but the demarcation line itself was as clear as a brick wall. A slightly rolling meadow came to an abrupt end at a thin creek. Beyond the trickle of water there was a tight tangle of gnarled and thorny trees, something like crabapple gone berserk. The road I had been following extended right to the edge of the creek. Beyond, there was only a very narrow trail that immediately started bending back and forth, making it impossible to see more than a few horse lengths ahead.

  I reined to a halt on the Fairy side of the creek.

  “This is it, kids,” I said, not the first time I had addressed my horses that way. It had been a long ride already. “We might as well stop for a good lunch and a short rest before we cross.”

  Electrum whinnied as if he understood what I was saying.

  Caution suggested that we get back a safe distance from that tangle of trees first, though. Even though the leaves had fallen, an archer in good camouflage gear could get almost down to the creek to launch an arrow without showing himself, if he was careful. I dismounted and led Electrum and Geezer back two hundred yards from the water. No archer I had ever come across could get an arrow that far over level ground, certainly not with enough force to do any damage.

  While I ate, I stared at the wild forest across the water. My danger sense kicked up anytime I looked away from it, as if warning me not to turn my back on the hazard. I got the message. There are different levels of danger, levels of unknowns. Once we crossed that creek, we would be in territory that even the Elflord of Xayber found fearful, a land that he said got stranger
and stranger the farther you penetrated into it.

  The challenges would start once we got inside the forest. I tried to imagine possibilities, but the elflord had warned me that my imagination wasn’t equal to that task. That didn’t stop the musing, of course. I ate. The horses grazed. When we got back to the creek, I let them drink for a few minutes before I mounted Electrum and led Geezer across the boundary.

  The trees got taller, thicker, more coarsely tangled. It didn’t matter that the leaves had fallen off most of them. There were enough trunks and branches to obscure the view.

  The elflord was right about my imagination. I couldn’t have foreseen the first challenge if I had spent a lifetime pondering the possibilities. And it came not an hour after we crossed the creek.

  The trail started out narrow, and it didn’t get any wider. The thorny trees pressed so close on either side that I had to give Geezer extra rein so he could follow directly behind Electrum. The path wasn’t wide enough for the horses to walk side by side. At times the trail seemed too narrow for even one horse. My knees and thighs got stuck a number of times. The thorns reached right out to prick me whenever they could—or so it seemed.

  It was damn slow riding. I had to keep looking back to make sure that the line to Geezer didn’t get tangled in the trees when the path jigged right or left—every couple of minutes. And I had to keep looking ahead because my danger sense wouldn’t let up. I could trust Electrum to pick his way along the path, but there might be other threats. Holding a compass heading was impossible. I hoped that the briar patch wouldn’t go on forever.

  Still, the thorns were only a nuisance, even though some of them were more than four inches long. The danger came when we reached the first clearing.

  Twelve (count ‘em folks, twelve) naked women were standing in a short arc near the far side of the clearing. Call it a sampler of feminine pulchritude: complexions ranging from the pure white of elvish skin to a deep swarthiness (but no blacks); hair colors from white-blond through red to chestnut and a deep black that was almost the blue of Superman’s hair in the comics; figures stretching from the barely nubile budding of adolescence to one woman with the most exaggerated dimensions I could imagine. And no matter the size, all of the breasts were firm and jutting, like the best that plastic surgery and the photographer’s airbrush could manage in tandem. The smiles of the ladies seemed right out of the finals of any major beauty pageant. Their skin was uniformly perfect, their hair fit for Madison Avenue. Twelve beauties—any one of them was enough to raise an erection on a dead man. And I wasn’t dead.

  I reined in Electrum while my danger sense went into extra innings, banging my head back and forth like the clapper on a church bell on Easter morning.

  Maybe I was a card-carrying Hero, but I wasn’t stupid. Even if it hadn’t been for the location and the forty-degree temperature, I would have guessed that there was something rotten about this presentation. I also knew that the safe course was to turn around and head back to the creek and find another route before I found myself up that creek without the proverbial paddle.

  But I couldn’t waste that much time, not when I could expect any route north to be defended against me. I clucked softly and Electrum moved a few steps forward. Then he stopped again. He’s a smart horse.

  “Ladies,” I said. It came out a little cracked, so I cleared my throat. “‘Had we but world enough and time, This coyness’ …” I stopped. The ladies had started walking slowly toward me, strutting, parading their, ah, virtues. They didn’t seem interested in my weak attempt at humor. That’s always my luck.

  “Welcome, stranger,” one in the middle—a fair ringer for a young Ann-Margret—said. She spread her arms in a welcoming gesture that invited me to leap right off my horse and onto her. “We’re looking for a Hero to keep us warm and satisfied.”

  Sure, every day.

  “Too cold,” I said. “It’d freeze right off.” I was sitting balanced for combat, ready to reach for both swords, through I kept my movements casual. I tied the lead for Geezer to the pommel of my saddle and looped Electrum’s reins loosely over them. Those twelve naked women scared the crap out of me, even though I could damn well see that they weren’t concealing any weapons.

  “We won’t let you freeze,” the big mama with the most exaggerated figure said at the end of the line. Call the measurements 48D, 28, 42, all firm and jutting. Unreal.

  “I took a vow,” I said. The only exit from the clearing, other than the one behind me, was over on the other side. I would have to ride straight through the middle of the line of chippies. The defensive line of the Chicago Bears couldn’t have looked so intimidating.

  “We took a vow too,” the one in the middle who had spoken before said. “If you don’t do each of us, we’ll do you—for supper.”

  “Eat ‘im up, eat ‘im up,” a number of the others chanted. Their smiles turned to grins. Their toothpaste-ad teeth turned to fangs of the carnivorous sort. They weren’t talking about oral sex.

  I dug my heels into Electrum and reached for my elf swords at the same time. In just a second, the harmonizing battle tunes of my swords drowned out the dinner chant of the women. The swords didn’t seem to intimidate them. The line charged at me. The closest ones leaped for me, arms spread, fangs showing. I probably imagined the sounds of stomachs rumbling in hunger.

  My swords were hungrier, and faster. They took off two lovely heads quickly, then bit into more beautiful flesh before Electrum beat a hole through the center of the line. It’s a good thing there were no newspapers or electronic media around, even better that the Great Earth Mother didn’t have one of the many students of Dr. Goebbels on the payroll. I could see the headlines on the tabloids: MAD SLASHER GOES ON RAMPAGE DURING GIRLS’ SCHOOL OUTING. The reality was jarring enough.

  The fight took only a few seconds, but I didn’t get away scot-free. By the time the last of the women fell wounded or dropped behind, I had dozens of deep scratches. Some of the women had claws that would do a Bengal tiger proud. One even slashed through the thick leather that cushioned my chain mail.

  The thorns that encroached on the path didn’t seem nearly so bad as I raced to escape the horny and hungry vixens. I kept looking back to see if any of the women had managed to hitch a ride on Geezer or if they were following me. My vision got blurred, and it took me a moment to realize that it was because I was crying. And it took even longer for me to discover that all those naked women had done more than just arouse me. They had pulled the trigger as well.

  I still hadn’t fully recovered my breath or my poise from that incident—I was still pounding along, and so was my heart—when Wrigley Field dropped out of the sky, the lights flashing on and off, flags showing a wind blowing out toward right field. Wrigley Field, home of the Cubs. Wouldn’t you know it: they finally put in lights for night baseball and just about the time people are beginning to forget that they weren’t always there, World War Three erupts. In a way, that figured. The same thing might have happened if they had won a World Series.

  But it was only the stadium that dropped, not the playing field itself. That would have put an early end to my quest. I was crossing where second base should have been, heading in the direction of the visitors’ bullpen. The force of the crash when the stadium hit the forest split the stands and I was able to ride straight through, though not with the aplomb that a Hero might be expected to show. Geezer needed some calming, but Electrum was rock-solid. He had faced dragons and didn’t know anything about baseball.

  Once we cleared the cracked stadium, we continued to follow the path through the thorny trees. Wrigley Field really gave me something to think about. First off, there was the matter of how it got out of Chicago intact through a nuclear war. Secondly, how did anyone know to drop that particular stadium on my head? I adjusted my Cubs cap and looked back. Evidently the Great Earth Mother was very big on “Know your enemy.” That didn’t, as they say, bode well for my mission.

  There were no more challenges through
that day, but after the Amazons and Wrigley Field, I was so nervous that I feared new disasters at every turn. I was so hyper by sunset that a simple “Boo!” behind me would have launched me at least as far as geostationary orbit.

  We stopped so I could cook my supper. I got a fire going that was much larger than I needed, too large for the prudent outdoorsman in a tinder-dry forest. I chopped down several small trees and hacked the thorny branches into small lengths with Dragon’s Death, using up some of the adrenaline that had been pumping through my veins all day. I cooked up four of my ready-to-barf dinner packets and ate them. Then we rode on, away from the ashes of the campfire. Warmth would be nice during the night, but after that day’s adventures, I had no intention of camping next to a beacon. There might still be a few of those hungry houris on my trail.

  Two hours later, I finally made camp. But I didn’t sleep much. Between reliving my confrontation with the voracious lovelies (and only the most exaggerated of them hadn’t done much for my innate lust) and wondering what was coming next, sleep didn’t seem to be the best idea in the world, not in that crazy forest where a threat could drop on me before I could even see it. I wasn’t ready to put full faith in the danger sense that a Hero of Varay has instilled along with his initiation. It had never stopped me from posting a guard at night when there were several of us along on a mission.

  The night was freezing. I sat in my tent with my blankets wrapped around me. I was still cold, especially my nose—which ran continuously except when it felt as if it were about to fall off. I thought a lot of cold thoughts in the night. I had to keep heading north, no matter how far—like Dr. Frankenstein pursuing his monster across the icefields. I was equipped for quite a bit of cold, but not for a polar winter. Thermal underwear and a fleece-lined parka will take you only so far. I wondered how cold it would get before I reached the central temple of the Great Earth Mother—where it would likely get much too hot for comfort. I worried about frostbite—even though it wasn’t really that cold yet—and I remembered a Jack London story about a man freezing to death and getting so deliciously warm just before the end. And I managed to think about how ironic it would be if I reached the Great Earth Mother, got her in the proper mood for what had to be done, then found that the important bits had been frostbitten and wouldn’t work. The Hero, unable to rise to his final challenge. I didn’t laugh.