The Hero of Varay

by Rick Shelley

  “I’ll turn on the TV so we can find out what’s going on,” I said after I got myself more or less under control. “You see if you can get through to your parents on the telephone.” I figured that the phone lines would all be jammed, but if Joy didn’t try, she might be sorry later. I was starting to think properly again, and that relaxed me a little more.

  “If you do get through, tell them that you’re safe and that I’ll make damn sure you stay safe.” I didn’t turn loose of Joy right away, though. “You might suggest that they put together whatever food and survival gear they can pack into their car and get ready to head out into the country if things get any worse.” If war did come, running to the country might not help, but it had to offer more hope than sitting around in a major metropolitan area waiting to be vaporized.

  Despite glasnost and perestroika and the disintegration of Communism in Eastern Europe, there was still a chance for all hell to break loose. The remaining hardliners might seize the opportunity to try to reestablish themselves. I couldn’t forget how the optimism of that May in Beijing had turned to horror in Tiananmen Square, the bloodshed that Romania had gone through, or the continuing difficulties within the Soviet republics.

  “Is that what we’re going to do?” Joy asked.

  “Something like that.” I didn’t even smile. I was too tense for that. “We’ve got a safe bolt hole we can get to in a hurry.” How long the buffer zone would remain safe if our world fell into a stupid general war I couldn’t guess … but I didn’t expect to see mushroom clouds over Varay.

  Joy went to the telephone while I turned on the televisions in the living room and master bedroom. There didn’t seem to be anything new on about the Coral Lady at the moment. In the bedroom, I spotted two six-foot swords lying on the bed. Two of them. I had forgotten the second sword, the one that Xayber’s son had used on me, and it had been a long time since I had heard the line that an abandoned elf sword would return to kill whoever abandoned it. That was why I started carrying the first one, Dragon’s Death. Now, it seemed, I had a second to worry about.

  There was a sheet of Uncle Parthet’s three-by-five spiral notebook paper with the swords, but all it said was: “See you at Basil.”

  Louisville! I hoped that everyone there had hopped back to Varay at the first word of trouble.

  “I can’t get through on the telephone,” Joy said when I rejoined her in the living room. “I can’t even get long distance. All I get is a busy signal when I dial the one.”

  “Did you try the operator?”

  “All lines are busy, please try again later.”

  “Then we’ll just have to keep trying,” I said, giving her a quick kiss.

  Joy nodded, too vaguely, then excused herself. As soon as I heard the bathroom door close, I hurried through the dining room and hit the silver tracing on the door to the kitchen and stepped through to Mother’s house. I started shouting and running through the place, but there was no one there. When I spotted both cars in the garage, I figured that they had all scrammed back to Varay. I hoped so. I even got home to Chicago before Joy came out of the bathroom.

  She went right to the telephone again and had no luck. She hung up and tried again. And again.

  “Give it a few minutes,” I suggested. I went to her and led her back to the sofa. “It can’t help to keep dialing over and over. That may be what’s keeping the lines tied up, everybody trying over and over like that.”

  She nodded. We sat on the sofa and watched the news on the television for a time. I held Joy close to me, but she hardly seemed aware of me. I could understand that. She was scared, really scared, for maybe the first time in her life. I was scared too, but fear was no stranger to me.

  The TV networks were all staying exclusively with coverage of the terrorist attack and the reactions to it around the world—obviously. They didn’t have a lot of information from anywhere near the scene yet: some tape taken from helicopters before the Air Force chased them away, a long way from the scene of the explosion, and the first radio reports from on the ground in west Florida—not very close to the scene either. Mostly, the networks were reduced to covering press conferences and briefings in Washington and Tallahassee. No one held out even the slightest hope for any of the people who had been on the Coral Lady, but the lists of passengers and crew weren’t being made public until an effort could be made to contact all of the families. A large section of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge crossing Tampa Bay had disappeared, and the remaining sections were just so much twisted wreckage. No one had any idea how many people and vehicles might have been lost on the bridge. Afternoon traffic had been heavy, according to one traffic helicopter that managed to escape the blast and land safely after the explosion. The blast had sent the waters of Tampa Bay crashing up on shore, then sucked the water level down as water streamed in to fill the hole left in the sea by the nuclear explosion. A second tidal wave flowed ashore then, swamping boats and low-lying coastal areas, causing more as-yet-unknown casualties and damage.

  At least the early diplomatic news was less terrifying. No one seemed ready to start throwing missiles around. Everyone was talking—saying “Not me” and generally condemning terrorism in general and the attack on the Coral Lady in particular. It wasn’t just the “man on the street” who was frightened by the possibilities. This time it was more than politics that got the various heads of state in front of the cameras and microphones.

  The networks had to fill most of their time covering the reactions of people like the ones Joy and I had seen at the airport and on the elevated coming in from O’Hare. The same kind of crowd scenes had been played out in most of the major cities of the United States to one degree or another, and there were some reports of panic overseas as well. People had been hurt, trampled. At least three had been killed in separate incidents. The initial panic was slow in passing, but conditions were already improving—according to one network anchorman who was just beginning to get his own emotions under control.

  Nearly a half hour passed before Joy decided to try calling her parents again. The network had gone to a rehash of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and the problems following those. They even started talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only cities to suffer nuclear explosions previously. Joy only had to try twice to get through to St. Louis this time.

  I busied myself checking to see if there was anything I wanted to take along to Varay. Sure, the immediate danger seemed less than it had just an hour before, but I wasn’t ready to accept even the remaining risk. I was going to get Joy somewhere safe. That still presented its own problems, but I couldn’t slough them off any longer.

  The telephone conversation sounded like a disaster of its own. Joy was talking and sobbing at the same time. I don’t know if her parents could understand a word she was saying. I couldn’t understand some of them. But she did calm down a little before she finished. Her parents had to know that she was safe, and she knew that they were safe. Since there were still no dangerous alarms of additional explosions coming over the television, that had to be enough for the moment.

  I handed Joy a box of tissues when she got off the telephone and she went through about half the box. Then she hugged me and put her head against my shoulder and I just held her until she was ready to talk.

  “They’re okay,” she said.

  I smiled. “Yeah, I could tell. You feeling better?”

  She nodded. “We’re still not having much of a reunion, are we?”

  “It’ll get better.” I took her back to the sofa and we sat down again. I wasn’t sure yet how to break the news about Varay to her, but I didn’t want to put it off any longer. I guess I hemmed and hawed around the fringes for several minutes before I really took the plunge.

  “You remember that I said that I have a safe place for us to go?” I started. Joy nodded.

  “I’ve been trying to find a way to tell you about this place since we started getting serious about each other.”

  She got a mildly puzzl
ed look on her face but didn’t say anything.

  “I love you,” I said. There was a long silence between us then. Joy’s puzzled look got deeper. I started feeling frustrated. I wasn’t getting anywhere.

  “I love you too,” Joy finally said, but she sounded hesitant, worried about where I was heading with the talk, I guess.

  “The problem is, if I just tell you about this place you’ll think I’m crazy. And if I take you there without telling you a little about it first, you’ll think you’re crazy. Or maybe you’ll just get scared.”

  “I’ve been scared since we heard about that bomb going off,” she said.

  Good point. Let’s try again, I told myself.

  “You know the story of Alice in Wonderland? She falls down a rabbit hole, then goes through a door into a crazy, magical world?”

  “I saw it on TV last year. What in the world are you getting at?”

  But I was running out of words. “I think it’s time to show you,” I said, getting up from the sofa. “Just remember A lice in Wonderland.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “We’re going someplace safe. And we start in the bedroom.” I had hold of her hand and half-pulled her up from the sofa. Joy started giggling. I guess she was ready to write off all the strange talk as the start of a new sex game. That would do for the moment.

  “You had me worried,” she said.

  We detoured to pick up her bags. I carried them into the master bedroom and left them right by the door.

  “Should I unpack anything first?” Joy asked.

  “Not yet.” I pulled her to me and kissed her with all the fervor and passion I could muster, then broke the clinch.

  “Just a second. I’ve got to get something before we go.”

  Specifically, I had to get the two elf swords. I slipped the straps for the shoulder rigs in place and the blades clattered together. Joy’s eyes expanded.

  “I told you that I ran into a guy with a six-foot sword,” I said, trying to make it sound light, like a joke. “The one with the ebony handle was his.”

  “And the other one?” She wanted it spelled out.

  “That’s mine.” I kept my eyes on Joy. Her smile had already evaporated. Now, fear started to crawl across her face again. It was time to hurry.

  “You’d better carry one of your bags. That will make this a little faster.”

  She nodded automatically and picked up the smaller suitcase, still looking at the hilts of the swords sticking up behind my shoulder. I used my rings to open the doorway into Castle Cayenne, then held it open with just my left hand. I used the right hand to urge Joy through the door. Her eyes went blank as soon as I opened the passage, but she didn’t resist. Then I pushed her other suitcase through with my foot and stepped through behind it.

  Joy turned to stare at me, and past me, again. When I took my left hand from the silver tracing and my Chicago bedroom disappeared, she screamed.

  She screamed.

  In the movies, the hero slaps the heroine’s face when she screams hysterically. She stops and after a dramatic pause for a close-up, she says, “Thanks, I needed that,” or something equally trite. Maybe real life was even like that once upon a time, but women’s lib and the modern horror of even minor violence on a personal scale have killed that kind of reaction. People get more upset if a man slaps a woman he knows than they do if he murders twenty or thirty strangers. In any case, I don’t think I could ever bring myself to hit Joy, certainly not for screaming in reasonable terror.

  I shouted her name, then took her in my arms and held her tight—with almost crushing force. The scream stopped, but the blank look of horror remained. I shook her, very gently, just enough to get her attention.

  “Joy, you’re safe here.” I spoke rather loudly to make sure that I was getting through. “I love you. I love you.” I didn’t know what else to say. I had never had to deal with hysterics before.

  I started to get scared again myself. I had worried about Joy’s reaction to Varay from the beginning, but I had never dreamed that her reaction might be this extreme, that she would go hysterical or catatonic on me. I held on to her until her shaking slowed down, then led her to the bed, and we sat on the edge of it. Joy moved as if she were in a trance. I continued to hold her tight.

  “This is Castle Cayenne, my home in the kingdom of Varay. That’s in a buffer zone between our world and Fairy,” I said, speaking slowly. All I could think to do was to tell her as much of the story as I could, in simple terms, and hope that some of it would penetrate the shock and start her back to an even keel. I thought that she would be able to cope very well, once she got used to the idea, if we could just get past this initial fright.

  “Alice in Wonderland. The Wizard of Oz. The idea shouldn’t be all that impossible to accept,” I said.

  “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto,” Joy misquoted dully. At least she was talking again.

  There was a sudden pounding at the door, and Joy jumped just as Lesh swung the door open and charged in with his sword in his hand. He saw me, us, and stopped. He started backing toward the door at once.

  “Sorry, lord,” he said, sheathing his blade. “We heard a scream. I didn’t know you were back.”

  “It’s okay, Lesh. We just got here,” I said. I looked from him to Joy, then back. “You might fetch a bottle of the Bushmills, some water, and a couple of glasses.”

  “Aye, lord.” Lesh backed the rest of the way to the door, half-bowing several times. “Are you feeling well now, lord?” he asked.

  “Well enough,” I said, nodding. Lesh closed the door as he left. Joy stared at the door, then turned her head to look at me.

  “Lesh?” she said.

  “You’ve met him before,” I reminded her. “A couple of times. He was at the hospital, and before that, in Chicago, during Mardi Gras.”

  “Am I going crazy or is this all a dream like The Wizard of Oz?”

  “Neither. You’re not going crazy and this isn’t a dream. This is all for real.”

  Joy shuddered, then put her head on my shoulder for a moment. She was still trembling, but not as wildly as before.

  “He kept calling you ‘lord,’” she said after a moment, and her voice was beginning to sound a little more normal as well.

  I took a deep breath. “He calls me that because he knows it doesn’t bother me as much as being called ‘Your Highness.’”

  “Gil, what’s going on?” Plaintive, still frightened, but not in the same way as before.

  “The ‘lord’ is because I’m the Hero of Varay. Capital H. It’s a formal title. But my great-grandfather is the king, and I’m also his heir.”

  She didn’t respond to that.

  “I didn’t learn about any of this until my twenty-first birthday,” I said. I started to tell her about that, but I didn’t get very far before Lesh knocked at the door and brought in a tray with a bottle of Bushmills Irish whiskey, a pitcher of water, and two small crystal glasses filled with ice cubes. Lesh and Parthet must have brought a load of ice through from Louisville.

  Lesh set the tray on the nightstand and left without speaking. I poured whiskey for both Joy and me. Joy was never much of a drinker. I had only seen her try hard liquor once, and she only rarely had a glass or two of wine with a meal. But she didn’t hesitate now, and she waved me off when I went to add water to her drink. She took the glass I handed her and poured most of the whiskey into her mouth. She coughed and gagged a little, then made a face, but it did seem to help her. She finished, handed the glass back to me, and said, “More.”

  I refilled her glass, and topped mine off. I had only had time to take one small sip of mine.

  “I’ve fallen into a fairy tale,” Joy mumbled while I was pouring her second drink.

  “Sort of,” I said, returning her glass.

  “With strange creatures, evil witches, and all that?”

  “Enough strange creatures, I suppose. No witches, but there are wizards, some good, some not. That kind
of magic is gender-specific.” The way Parthet put it was a lot earthier. “The only woman with the balls for magic is the Great Earth Mother,” he told me when I asked him about witches, “and she is far beyond mere magic.”

  “My Uncle Parker—his real name is Parthet, by the way—is a wizard.”

  “That funny old man?” She hesitated a bit, took a more controlled drink of her whiskey, then said, “I guess he does look a little like the phony wizard in The Wizard of Oz.”

  “Well, Parthet may not be the most talented wizard around, but he is for real. So are the dragons, trolls, evil elflords, and all the rest.”

  “Oh, shit,” Joy said. She took another long drink, coming close to the bottom of the glass again. I took a fair-sized drink myself. I had never heard her use the word shit before. She was starting to pick up one of my bad habits.

  “You ready for the fifty-cent tour of Castle Cayenne?” I asked.

  Her smile was weak, but she was trying. “Might as well,” she said. We both emptied our drinks first.

  “We’re closer to the top than the bottom, so I guess we start there,” I said, leading her to the stairs.

  Castle Cayenne was more than a thousand years old. At least some parts of the original were still in use, though the castle had been rebuilt, repaired, and renovated several times in that millennium. Even I had made some changes to the place in the three years since King Pregel presented it to me as my “local” residence. The biggest change was the water supply. We now had a fifteen-hundred-gallon water tank on the roof and a three-inch fire hose running from it to a small stream several hundred yards from the castle. I didn’t have a pump, but Uncle Parthet had come up with a dandy spell to make water run uphill—or up the hose at least—to keep the tank full, so I had running water in the castle. I even had hot water, during the day and for a few hours after sunset, on days when the sun shone. I didn’t have the most efficient solar system, but at least I could take a bath without freezing or having servants haul buckets of hot water up from the kitchen. Castle Cayenne also had a rudimentary septic tank and drainfield installed outside to help get rid of waste, along with the accompanying odors and health hazards that go with the lack of modern sewer systems. Maybe I couldn’t give Cayenne all of the modern conveniences, but when I moved in I was determined to go as far as I could.