The Hero King

by Rick Shelley

  I gave her an up-and-down look. “How long have I been gone here?’ She looked about ready to bust, she was so big around the middle.

  “Five months or more,” Joy said. “It’s been hard to tell how much time is passing.” I knew what she meant by that.

  “It should be late March now, spring,” Baron Kardeen said, but with less certainty than usual.

  “I told everyone that I refused to have the baby until you got back,” Joy said.

  Slowly, with much confusion and delay, I got everyone seated at the table. I collapsed into my chair at the head of the table.

  “Is there any food?” I asked. “I’ve been on tight rations for an eternity.” Kardeen sent two pages scurrying down to the kitchen. Lesh poured me a mug of beer from a keg right there in the room. As soon as I took my first drink, he filled a second mug and set it on the table in front of me. I mentioned the horses. Timon ducked down the back steps for a moment, then came running back and told me that the animals would be tended immediately.

  I drained off the first beer and started the second while Lesh refilled the first and brought it back. I looked around the table. Except for Joy, everyone looked thinner than I recalled, especially Parthet. He seemed to be scarcely more than a wraith.

  “Have you been sick, Uncle Parker?” I asked.

  “Not sick,” he said, very softly, “but my world has passed. I finished the memoir you wanted, what I could recall.”

  Not that I wanted, that he said he should write: I remembered that. I stared at Parthet. The others were silent, an indication that they knew more about his condition then he was telling me.

  “We can speak of all that later,” he said. “What of your travels?”

  My travels. I did need to speak of them, and once I started talking, it became a catharsis I could barely control. The food came—a full meal’s worth for everyone. I ate, I drank. So did the others. But mostly I talked and studied the faces and reactions of the others. The two beer mugs were refilled as often as I drained them, to keep my throat lubricated for talking and eating. But the focus was always on what I saying.

  Joy sat right at my side, where she belonged, where I wanted her. Her face was pale, chalky, almost as white as Annick’s or the elflord’s. Joy held on to me and did a lot of silent crying. I could feel her trembling through the hand she kept on my shoulder. I interrupted my recital early to ask about her family. They were alive, safe—her mother was fully recovered from the side effects of her radiation sickness—but the Bennetts were all as terrified as everyone else in Castle Basil, perhaps more terrified than some.

  Baron Kardeen appeared to have aged twenty years. His hair was grayer, his eyes showed the memory of his own fear. But there was still an air of competence in his every word and move … even if his hands did tremble just a little now and then.

  Lesh, as sturdy as ever, tried to hide his feelings, but his face was ashen, like that of someone who has just had a serious heart attack. It was a fit color to match the infinite gray outside the castle. But although Lesh tried to hide his feelings, he gave himself away clearly, acting the page, moving to refill my mug every time I emptied one, pushing platters of food my way.

  Timon was at the far end of the table, listening with transparent awe, sometimes forgetting to stuff anything into his mouth for minutes at a time. Awe and fear. They do belong together.

  Mother. She was showing signs of stress too, more than I had ever seen from her before. Even when we found her waiting with father’s body she had been collected, fully in control of herself. She wasn’t like that now. There were plain lines on her face and indications that she had been biting her lips a lot.

  “This was all inevitable from the moment I became both king and Hero,” I said, staring at her. Perhaps that wasn’t the right time for that kind of “I told you so.” I might have avoided any mention of it just then or glossed over it. But I couldn’t hold it back. I couldn’t be silent or consoling about it.

  “The legend you and Dad were so eager to claim somehow got mixed up over the years. It wasn’t a Golden Age that had to come when the same man was both king and Hero, it was Doomsday, the end of the universe that Vara sired.” I had been bitter about the way that my parents had secretly groomed me for the twin roles, denying me any real choice in my own life. What I had gone through and seen certainly didn’t dull the anger I felt. Mother didn’t reply.

  Parthet looked as frail as Pregel had in the days just before his death, and I knew that I was going to have to force that long talk with Uncle Parthet very soon if we were ever going to have it.

  “Where’s Aaron?” I asked, interrupting myself—whatever I had been saying just then.

  “Either in his workroom or somewhere with Annick,” Parthet said.

  “Safe?”

  “Safe,” Parthet assured me.

  “But Harkane’s gone, sire,” Lesh said. “He was at Cayenne.”

  “None of the magic doorways works now,” Parthet said. “Even Aaron can’t work a passage to any of the other doors, not even the ones here in Varay.”

  I talked, and then I listened while Kardeen and the others told me what they had experienced.

  There had been neither day nor night at Castle Basil since the arrival of the gray limbo outside. There was still food and drink, enough to last a minimum of another three months even with the added mouths of about one hundred and fifty refugees who hadn’t been permanently relocated before the end came. Castle Basil was always stocked against the faint possibility of siege, even though it had never been invested by an enemy and the doorways had always provided a means of resupplying it.

  The End (everyone referred to it that way) had been eerie at Castle Basil. A thick snowstorm had obscured most of the sights the morning the End came. The snow was remarkable in itself, heavier than anyone could remember any snowfall at Basil, where the winters are generally mild and short and two inches of snow in a month is rare. This snow had been blizzard-thick, but without the wind, obscuring vision but drawing people outside to watch it and frolic. But the snow came to an abrupt halt. Beyond the castle wall, even the flakes in the sky on their way down vanished. Inside the castle, the snow already coming down landed. Then there was nothing but the solid gray above the castle and beyond its walls. The Rock was visible, and the path leading down, but nothing beyond.

  “It was a terrible day,” Parthet said. “When the world disappeared so suddenly, we knew that it was the End. The conclusion was inescapable. The End of Everything had come. You had failed. I’ve never known a time of such thorough despair in my considerable life.” He looked down at the table, his hands clasped together in front of him.

  “The despair was so complete that it seemed ages before I saw the flaw in it.” He looked up at me then, but his voice remained somber.

  “We hadn’t disappeared with the world around us.” He shrugged.

  “Of course, when that did penetrate my skull, there seemed to be several possible answers. The isolation might be our hell—damnation to an eternity like this. Or we might simply be the last place to fade. That seemed to be the most likely explanation at the moment—that Basil Rock actually was the hub of the universe and would simply be the last to fade. And, finally, there was a chance that you had achieved at least partial success.

  “When the castle persisted, the second explanation became less and less likely. When the gray outside also persisted, the first became more likely. Until you returned.”

  Baron Kardeen had attempted to send scouts down the trail to Basil Town, that first day and on many after, but the gate refused to open. It even proved impossible to lower men from the wall to the path outside. The gray prevented any exit from the castle.

  Before long, no one would even attempt to leave, not even men who had families down in the town. People huddled together inside the castle, stewing in their fear. There had been a few suicides—a previously unheard-of occurrence in Varay. A few other people had gone raving mad. Aaron and Parthet had bee
n able to help them, but their magic was weak, more draining than usual. There were severe limits to what they could accomplish.

  Seven weeks had passed since the universe disappeared from around Castle Basil. Seven weeks … as close as anyone inside could tell.

  I already knew about the crazy way time seemed to sneak around its own backside, messing up internal rhythms and providing no external clues. Even simple references to time were apt to get screwed up by the reality. The telling of tales in the small dining room may have taken two hours or ten. We all ate and drank, if not as intently as at a “regular” meal, then at least without breaking off the “meal” completely. There was always food on the table. Anyone could grab a helping or two of anything, and everyone did, whenever.

  Aaron made an appearance, but he didn’t stay long. “He spends most of his time with Annick these days,” Parthet told me. I sensed that there was something more to the statement, but—like everything else that day—Parthet didn’t seem anxious to talk about it, at least in front of others.

  Even in limbo, Castle Basil needed some management. Baron Kardeen excused himself a number of times to see to one thing or another. Lesh went out a couple of times too. Now that I was back, he figured that it would be possible to reestablish regular watches on the walls. “It may all come back as quick as it went, and we won’t want to miss it by a second, right, sire?” he said. I grinned and nodded, and Lesh hurried off to see to it. Whether or not anything ever came back, Lesh seemed to have found the perfect line for us to take under the circumstances.

  “If you are a true heir of Vara, you may be able to see that some portion of this world is recreated in the next.” There had been no promises in what Xayber said. Maybe this was all I had been able to save. And there might be no next world to graft it on.

  I didn’t know what to think.

  Later, an indefinite later, after the urgent histories had been exchanged, I decided that it was time for me to make an appearance downstairs. “And then, I think it must be time to sleep,” I told the others. I was feeling considerably stronger after consuming a couple of days’ worth of food and beer—even by Basil standards—but ten or twelve hours of sleep would really help a lot.

  “I’ll wait for you in our room,” said Joy. “I really don’t like to take all those stairs more often than I absolutely have to.” She put her hands on her belly to make sure that I knew what she was talking about.

  “I won’t be long,” I promised, and then I gave her a kiss that almost became more urgent than the appearance in the great hall.

  The rest of us went down to the main floor together, but Mother and Parthet both turned off to go to their own rooms. Mother had sat through the entire discussion upstairs, wearing her guilt quietly. She had never tried to argue the point I had made, never tried to shift the blame. I didn’t press the matter. I mentioned the facts. She took it from there. Parthet had also sat through the recitation, doing his share of the eating and drinking, and perhaps dozing for a few minutes a couple of times. He hadn’t seemed to miss anything important. When we started down the stairs, he had to take them more slowly than usual. He seemed to be having difficulty, but he managed on his own after refusing offers of help from both me and Lesh.

  There were more people in the great hall than when I had made my first appearance there earlier. Everyone seemed to be waiting for me, as I had sensed they would.

  They had questions. I was the only one who might have answers.

  I went to my seat at the head table. People stood, and sat when I gestured them down. Kardeen sat next to me. Lesh and Timon stood behind us. Pages brought beer and bowls of pretzels.

  “I know you’ve all been frightened,” I said. “I have been too, for ages and ages. Nothing like this has happened in thousands of years.” I paused. “But it has happened before, more than once, perhaps many times, and people have survived.” A brand-new thought hit me then, and I had to wait for it to run a couple of laps around my mind before I said anything about it.

  “In fact, the last time this happened, the new world was a lot better, in the mortal realm for certain, and almost certainly here as well.” A lot of the people in the great hall were from the other world. “It marks the sudden leap from the late Stone Age to the early civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia.” It was a beautiful theory that made so much sense to me that I didn’t doubt it in the least: the sudden appearance of written language, widespread settled cultures, pharaonic Egypt.

  “We can’t be sure yet what will result this time, but I’m as confident as I can be that the gray outside won’t be eternal. Something will return. We have to wait for it, as patiently as we can. After all, we’re not going to run out of food or anything else anytime soon.”

  There wasn’t much more I could say, so I didn’t try. Someone else could pass along the details of my journey north … and beyond. I hoped that folks would exercise a certain amount of discretion in that.

  “Will there really be a new world?” Joy asked when I got back to her.

  “I believe so,” I said. “Apparently, this kind of situation has happened a number of times in the past. Xayber said that he had gone through several of these cycles, and the Great Earth Mother confirmed that there had been many.” I was reluctant to go into any real detail about my time in the temple of the Great Earth Mother with Joy, even about the talk that had preceded our session in bed. Under the circumstances, I had no reason to feel guilty about that. With the entire universe in extremis, what I had done could hardly be considered infidelity. Still, I couldn’t entirely suppress an uneasiness. I would have been extremely uncomfortable giving Joy a blow-by-blow account. I would have if she had demanded it, but she didn’t.

  We got undressed and into bed. Joy had me feel the baby’s kicking, a startling sensation the first several times. We lay together, holding on, for a long time, but there was no question of sex, not when I was afraid that Joy might pick about any second to shoot our first child into the world—or whatever it was out there beyond the castle walls.

  Joy had less trouble getting to sleep than I did. Her soft breathing lulled me to the edge of sleep, but I needed forever to tip across that edge. I remember thinking, I hope this part isn’t just a dream, and then there was that inner void finally ready to claim me.

  When I woke feeling that it must be time for morning, I decided that I had better find Parthet as soon as possible. Joy slept on. I dressed and went around to ask somebody where the old wizard had been sleeping lately. The room above his workroom had been turned over to Aaron, and so had the workroom. According to Lesh, Parthet had announced, loudly and often during my absence, that he was retired, that Aaron was now the wizard of Varay. I learned that Parthet had claimed a small tower room that gave him fairly direct access to the kitchen and great hall. He was in the kitchen when I started through there for the tower stairs.

  “I don’t sleep much anymore,” Parthet said, greeting me with an answer to a question I hadn’t even thought of asking.

  “I think we need to have a talk,” I said.

  He smiled over a mug of coffee. “I expect we do,” he said. “I know what I look like.”

  “Like Grandfather did, except you’re trying to tell me that you haven’t been sick.”

  “I haven’t been sick, and I’m not sick now. But …” He looked around. “This isn’t the place for our talk. I think they’re about ready to start toting your breakfast upstairs. We could talk up in your dining room. As homey as this kitchen is, perhaps this particular conversation deserves a different setting, and fewer ears to listen.”

  Once we got out in the corridors, away from other eyes, Parthet only made a pro forma protest against the support I offered him. I brushed aside the protest and held his arm while we walked, supporting as much of his remaining weight as I could.

  “You talk as though you’ve made all your preparations for death,” I said when we stopped to let him rest for a moment halfway up the stairs.

  “Most of
them,” he conceded easily. “There’s not much left to do.” He started walking again, and I couldn’t get anything else from him until we were seated at the table in the private dining room upstairs.

  “I’m part of Vara’s world, Vara’s universe,” Parthet said when he was settled in a chair. “It seems that I am—or was, to be more accurate—an integral part of it. Perhaps you’ll understand that better if you get a chance to read the book of memories you forced me to write.”

  “It was your idea, not mine,” I reminded him. “But I’ll read it, never fear.” And then, for the first time in ages, I thought of my grandmother’s Tower Chapbook. Mother had left that for me with the note that brought me to Varay. Over the years, I had glanced at it a few times, read a few short sections, but I hadn’t really sat down and thoroughly read it yet. “I’ll read it,” I told Parthet again, but I was talking about both books.

  “When you forced the memories back, you forced the memoir,” Parthet said. He snorted. “Vara’s world. And now, that world is passing, almost dead. Your world is a-borning. When the transition is complete, I will be gone.”

  “That sounds rather melodramatic, Uncle,” I said.

  “Perhaps, but true. It’s not an old man’s fancy. You can see yourself what has become of me. There is no chance for me to see the world you’ve made. I would like to see it, at least enough of it to judge how well you did.” A wan smile. “A ripping good show, I’m sure.”

  “Can’t Aaron do something to help you?”

  “Not a thing, no more than he could help Pregel. The lad will do you proud, Gil. He’s a better wizard than I ever was—tenfold, maybe a hundredfold. He’ll serve you and your children and their children for ages to come.”

  “I’d as soon have you around longer, bad eyes, dirty jokes, and all.”

  “I thank you for that, but there simply is no way. Call it a natural law, one I’ve only recently discovered.”

  He was as serious as he could be. I could tell that from the sound of his voice and the look on his face. And I never even considered that it might just be a case of an old man talking himself into a delusion. Not Uncle Parthet. And he didn’t simply think that he was going to die soon, he was positive, he knew it.