by Rick Shelley
There was one warm, if puzzling moment. I found four cans of beer tucked into one of the packs. That would help the water last a little longer, but I would have sworn that I hadn’t packed any beer on this trip. If I had, I would have packed a full six-pack, and I was as positive as I could be that I hadn’t had any beer along the trail.
Not all of the food was the instant heat-and-eat sort. There was beef jerky, there were a few packets of military field rations, and there were the vegetables I recalled, some carrots and onions mostly, and there were a dozen apples—those I also didn’t recall.
We all ate, if sparingly. I didn’t know how long we had to stretch our supplies. I had one beer and I let the horses drink just enough water to wash down their food and wet their throats.
“I’m tired, and I bet you guys are too,” I said after we finished. I didn’t know why I was tired. The concept itself needed a moment’s thought, as if it was something completely novel. A long rest seemed appropriate.
“Don’t start wandering, huh?” I said as I lay down. There was no place to anchor the picket line—I couldn’t pound the stake into the gray void no matter how hard I tried—so I just wrapped one end of the rope loosely around my wrist. My swords hung from the pommel of Electrum’s saddle.
There was enough support for me in the gray void. It seemed to mold itself to me.
I slept.
When I woke, I was thinking about when I came home from college for my twenty-first birthday. That was the day I found the note on Mother’s lilac-colored stationery that sent me through a magic doorway into Varay. I recalled questing after my parents, with Lesh, Parthet, and Timon as my companions. We found Mother standing sentry over my father’s body in a small cottage in an orchard in the easternmost part of Varay, not far from Castle Thyme.
The wages of heroism.
I sat up. I couldn’t ignore these memories, couldn’t push them aside to find their places in my mind. This was my past, my history. The Etevar of Dorthin. The Elflord of Xayber. Annick—white fire.
My memories were finally coherent. They were also compelling. I relived the last four years of my life, seemingly in real time, which was no more impossible than a thousand other impossibilities I had experienced during those years. The sequence finally brought me to the Great Earth Mother and the final insanity I entered between her legs. My memories ended with a universe-ending explosion and resumed after an indeterminate gap in this gray limbo.
I looked up at my horses.
“It looks like we failed,” I said, but that explanation wasn’t really at all satisfactory. It didn’t explain how I had survived, or my horses. The animals had been tethered outside the temple. My clothes and swords had been dropped at the foot of the Great Earth Mother’s bed. I had left the world the way I entered it—naked and through a woman’s birth canal.
I stood, strapped on my swords, and mounted Electrum.
“We’d better ration our supplies, boys,” I said, and then we rode off across more of the gray void.
Time still had no real significance. Perhaps that is what allowed the food and water to last. The gray of the void got a little darker as we rode. There was also some contrast to it, finally, as a lighter gray mist formed and swirled, always at an indeterminate but considerable distance.
“Maybe we’re making some progress at that,” I said.
There was nothing to do but continue to ride, no matter how pointless it might seem—not knowing where we were going or why, having no known goal, it did seem pointless. I couldn’t guess where we might be headed, or if there would be anything there when we arrived. I had no real plan. The best I could think of was to continue riding in a straight line, if there was such a thing as “a straight line” in this dimensional limbo, holding to the course we were on when I first became aware of movement … when I first became aware of awareness.
I had no feelings of danger or even anxiety, and at the time I didn’t even consider that lack unusual. Reality was a nebulous concept then, as vague as the limbo. We rode on, going as far as we could, and then stopping to eat and sleep. I slept without dreams, without difficulty.
The gray went on, and so did we. The mist advanced and retreated, increased and decreased, cavorted in subtle patterns of almost-nothingness. I welcomed the variety, limited though it was.
Days passed, surely, maybe even weeks or months. I had a sense of duration, of time passing, but it was impossibly vague, uncalibrated. Time had meaning again, but not much.
And then, eventually/finally/already, there was something on the horizon—something that defined a horizon for the first time simply by being there. It was a dark speck, nothing more, but it was the first dark speck to intrude on the endless gray. I couldn’t guess what the speck was or how far away it might be, but since there was nothing else around—and hadn’t been in the eternity of my ride—it had to be where we were supposed to go.
“Something survived, so I guess maybe there is some hope yet,” I said.
Hope was a new concept.
We rode until exhaustion returned. The dark speck might have grown just a smidgen, but it was still much too distant to show any clear form … if it had clear form. I only knew that we had to try to reach it.
My sleep this time was shallow, disturbed. There was hope. That meant there was also room for despair again. Electrum and Geezer seemed to pick up my feelings, or perhaps they had also seen the distant speck on the horizon and realized that it had to be our goal. Whatever, they didn’t rest easy either. They tugged on the picket line I had wrapped around my wrist several times for the “night.”
Another long ride brought the beginning of form to the distant object, and I started to harbor some hope of eventual recognition. We rode to exhaustion, but this time we took only a short rest before we started out again. The horses and I were all too keyed up to stay put very long.
In an hour or thereabouts, by my vague awareness of time in this place, I reined in Electrum.
“That’s Basil Rock,” I said.
Electrum whinnied. Geezer snorted.
We rode on, a little faster now.
At times, the mist completely obscured the still-distant rock, churning anxiety into me until the rock came back into view. The mist came and went. When it cleared, even momentarily, the rock was always there, always larger, always closer, looking more naked than I had ever seen it, without the trees below hiding its lowest reaches, without any hint of the town that nestled at the foot of its southern and western flanks.
But the distance decreased with maddening slowness, and I wondered if the rock was only a mirage put there to torment me and to drag me back down into the void of insanity.
After another sleep that was forced by exhaustion and hunger, my rested eyes were able to discern the outline of the ramparts of Castle Basil atop its rock. My heart started thumping with more hope than I had known since World War Three sent me racing off to find Joy’s family … and then, the Great Earth Mother.
“They called Basil Rock the hub of the universe,” I informed my horses, as if they might care. Now, for the first time, I had to admit to myself that that legend might be accurate, unless we were chasing a mirage.
We ate the last of the food. The horses drank the last of the water. I drank the final beer. If the rock ahead of us was a mirage, the end would not be too far off.
“This is it, kids,” I said when I climbed aboard Electrum again. “We ride until we get home or until we drop.”
It was a close thing.
Time took charge of my mind again and dragged its heels over every pulse of blood and thought. It wasn’t just slowness, it was … it was … it was something I can’t describe, vaguely similar to the last few notes coming from a spring-wound music box, just as the spring is winding down fully. That is as close as I can come.
We rode. Occasionally, the horses managed a soft canter for a few minutes. They rode with their ears angled forward, almost as if they could hear the sounds of home, or expected to
hear those sounds. But Basil grew with incredible slowness. Hunger returned, and exhaustion. The horses fell into a walk that seemed about the speed at which a baby might crawl.
Basil Rock. Castle Basil.
Joy might be there. I could hardly control myself when that thought assailed me. I could hardly think beyond the possibility that Joy might also have survived. It might be a fool’s dream, but I had nothing but fools’ dreams to hold me anyway. In all of the destruction, how could anything or anyone have survived?
I survived. My horses survived.
Perhaps all logic died with the universe of Vara and the Great Earth Mother. My apparent survival might mean nothing. It might only be the hell to which I had been condemned.
We rode a little farther. The horses were beginning to stumble over their own feet. There was certainly nothing else for them to stumble over.
I could see some detail in the Rock, in the castle walls, but no matter how tightly I squinted, I couldn’t make out any movement at the crenels, any sign that there were people—living, breathing people—within the castle.
Basil Town was definitely missing. Basil Rock rose straight out of the gray limbo. No town, no River Tarn, no Forest of Precarra. I had to ride halfway around the rock to the south face. I tried calling. I shouted, but the grayness seemed to swallow my words.
We climbed the path up toward the top of the Rock and the castle gate. It was a slow climb, but it still almost proved to be too much for my horses. I dismounted and walked ahead of the horses up the incline, tugging on the reins to give what little help I could, as if I might be able to hoist them behind me. Halfway up, I stopped and unloaded Geezer, dumped the tent and blankets, the coffeepot and a few remaining cans of Sterno, everything but Geezer’s bridle and the leather lead strap. I lightened Electrum’s load as much as I could too, unsaddling him. He hadn’t carried much besides me. I set everything on the path. Maybe it would still be there when there was a chance to retrieve it. If there proved to be any point to retrieval.
“Just a little farther now,” I whispered. “If we’re lucky, there’ll be all the hay and oats and water you could possibly want.”
The path up the Rock had never seemed so steep before. And the time was still a little crazy. We needed a lifetime to reach the gate at the top of the path.
The gate swung open.
20
The Rock
No hands had touched the gate. It opened of its own accord. I led my horses through the gateway and stopped in the courtyard. The gate closed behind us, by itself. The bar that normally needed two strong men to slide it home slipped across without a single hand helping—real Twilight Zone stuff.
I didn’t see anyone in the courtyard or up on the walls. The hoofs of my horses clopped loudly on the stone of Basil Rock as I led them toward the stables, across the courtyard from the keep, around the corner. What I wanted to do was leave the animals to find their own way while I ran for the keep to try to find Joy, or anyone else, some assurance that I wasn’t totally alone in the universe. But I forced myself to look after Electrum and Geezer first. They needed my attention, deserved it.
There were other horses in the mews. That was encouraging, enough to increase the pounding of my heart. The castle had survived, and there were horses. I got Electrum and Geezer out of their bridles as quickly as I could, set up a solid meal of hay and oats for them, made sure they had water available but didn’t get into it too soon. Even the slow walk they had been making the last part of our journey had been taxing for them. They were hot, sweating. They needed a few minutes to cool down.
Precious minutes that I had to wait with them.
“I’ll be back later to give you a good rubdown if I can’t find any of the stable boys,” I promised when I finally let them at the water. The stable boys would do a better job of taking care of the horses after a long journey than I could. “If there’s a later,” I added. That was still a major uncertainty.
The other horses looked as if they had been tended regularly—if not to the usual standards of the royal stable.
“Somebody must still be around,” I said, more to reassure myself than the horses. I wanted to believe, I thought there was reason to believe … but I was afraid to let myself believe in anything until I actually saw it, touched it.
I went back out into the courtyard and looked up at the tops of the walls again. Normally, there would be at least two or three sentries visible, more in times of trouble. But there were none now, not a one. Then I looked at the keep. No guards stood at the entrance.
After standing and looking around for what had to be several minutes, I took a deep breath and walked to the huge doors. They were bolted on the inside. I raised a fist to pound, but heard the bar sliding across its brackets on the inside. But the door didn’t swing open by itself the way the gate had. I had to push.
There was no one in the entry way. Across the corridor, the door to the great hall was closed. I went to it, then hesitated for a long moment before I pushed it open.
There were people in the great hall.
Relief washed over me so frantically that I nearly fainted from the overload. Blood drained from my head. Dizziness bubbled through. My heart actually seemed to stop pumping for an instant.
People!
Eyes turned to look at me. There were at least a hundred people in the great hall, some at the table, some sitting on benches near the hearths or along the walls. They were nervous people with nervous eyes, looking at me as a drowning man might look at a lifeguard who was just too far away to help.
I looked around at familiar faces. For a moment—a long, suspended moment—the tableau was frozen in silence. The great hall was crowded with soldiers, servants, clerks and cooks, refugees from the camps in Illinois, adults and children.
Despite the crowd, Lesh was the only person sitting at the head table, down near the end of it. Even he needed time to react to my sudden entrance.
Then the room erupted in sound. Lesh stood and had to grab the edge of the table as his knees threatened a mutiny, started to buckle under him—enough that I could see it from the doorway. Then he straightened up and started toward me, stepping down from the dais, walking quickly—then stopping uncertainly.
“Sire?” he called. We moved toward each other.
“Joy?” I asked.
Lesh stopped walking, and his answer was delayed just long enough to let fear throw the hangman’s noose back around my heart.
“She’s upstairs, lord, with the others.”
I felt another surge of relief. I stumbled, almost went down, and Lesh was at my side in an instant, supporting my weight while I recovered enough to hold myself up again.
“We nearly gave up hope for you, lord,” Lesh said.
People started to crowd around us. It was impossible to make out much of what they said with dozens of people talking at once. All I could get was some of the flavor. Part of it was relief at my return and the promise that it held. More of it was fear, even panic, over the unprecedented isolation of Castle Basil and the endless gray outside.
“There is hope, real hope now,” I said, loud enough to cut through some of the clamor. That silenced the rest momentarily.
“Where is Joy?” I asked Lesh.
“In your private dining room, sire, with the chamberlain and the others.”
“Take me there, Lesh. I don’t think I have the strength to make it alone.”
Lesh took me at my word. He damn near carried me. It might have been faster if he had. I kept stumbling in my rush, and without Lesh at my side supporting much of my weight, I would have fallen.
“Has it been bad here?” I asked when Lesh and I were on the stairs, away from any other ears.
Lesh hesitated. I knew him well enough to figure that he was trying to find the most precise way he could to tell me what it had been like.
“The terror,” he said finally. “The whole world and the sky both disappeared in an instant, like, and we was all alone. Them as w
as even down in Basil Town just vanished. Folks here are mostly too terrified to set foot out of the keep, fearing like they’d be gone too. It’s hard to get anything done at all.”
It was a tremendously long speech for Lesh. It took all of the way to the top of the stairs. I stopped there.
“You’d better go ahead and warn them, Lesh. Tell them I’m back.” The shock might still be considerable in two stages, but I thought it would work better that way than if I just barged in without warning.
“Aye, lord.” Lesh let go of my arm and waited to make sure that I wasn’t going to fall down before he hurried down the corridor to the small dining room. I followed more slowly, not entirely by choice.
I had taken only three or four steps before I heard Lesh announce, “He’s back,” right in the doorway to the dining room. Then I heard chairs scrape against the floor, and voices that climbed all over each other.
Joy met me at the door and flung her arms around me, almost knocking us both over. As soon as we got our balance, we went through the obligatory mad-reunion scene, replete with kisses, tears, and totally incoherent words. It was so intense that I wasn’t sure I could make it through the next minutes. Emotion? That’s too tame a word. I had long feared that I would never get to see Joy again, but there we were.
There was right in the doorway, so the others in the dining room couldn’t get out to surround us. When Joy and I finally separated to catch our breath, we moved into the room. I finally had a chance to notice the others, a chance to get a better look at Joy.
