Son of the Hero

7 – The Hero

My insides seemed to lock up on me. I knew what she was saying. There was no point in questioning it. Even the blind instinct to repeat bad news was blocked. I don't think I had ever seen Mother cry before. Parthet and Lesh stood with us. The four of us remained silent for a time and a time. Timon arrived, dismounted, gathered up the reins of all our horses, and took them off to the side without saying anything, while the rest of us remained locked in tableau. Timon must have felt the grief. When I finally spoke, the words seemed to isolate themselves in the air one at a time, like crystal bubbles, fragile explosive charges.

"Where is he?" I asked.

"Inside," Mother said, without any hint of gesture.

I looked at the door behind her, walked to it-very slowly. I hesitated before I pulled it open, and hesitated again between the dim twilight outside and the blackness within. As my eyes started to adjust, as well as they could, to the internal darkness, I saw a few vague shapes inside. I felt a tap on my shoulder. When I turned, Parthet handed me my flashlight. I nodded and he backed off, leaving the moment to me.

I turned on the flashlight and stepped into the cottage. It was as simple and mean a hovel as Parthet's. Dad was lying on a bench at the side of the room, over to my right. Carl Tyner, King's Champion, Hero of Varay. Dad.

Dead.

He was dressed for the outdoors, leather tunic over fatigue trousers like mine, Robin Hood cap on his head. His head rested on a small shield with a piece of fabric, something like burlap, folded over it into a thin pillow. His hands were clasped on his chest, over the hilt of his sword. I stared, looking for some trace of his chest rising and falling as he breathed, but there was no movement, no breath. I knew that there wouldn't be, but that impossible hope nagged at my mind. His eyes were closed. His face looked serene, at peace. I saw no sign of wounds.

An emptiness swelled up inside and reached out to engulf me, a series of sensations that I had no precedents for. My throat got tight. My heart seemed to flutter. But even those commonplaces were somehow different, strange. The pain was there, but something bottled it up tight, sealed it off in a cold chamber somewhere to wait for a more appropriate time. My mind tried to reject the reality. Maybe I was trapped in a fairy-tale world with dragons and wizards, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't con myself into believing that death was any less final because of that. I looked at the body at the side of the room. I had never let myself dwell on this possibility. Deep down, I guess I had never been able to completely shake the feeling that Varay was some kind of mental aberration, that none of my adventures were real.

Too late the waking. I walked across the room and stood next to the bench. I played the light along the supine form and kept staring. Death was real, and reality was an ulcer's fire in my gut. Closing my eyes didn't make the pain go away, and opening them didn't alter the reality.

I heard a slight shuffling behind me. Mother and Uncle Parthet had come in together. I turned around while Mother lit two candles.

"How did it happen?" I whispered instinctively.

"Nine days ago," Mother said, answering a different question. I turned to look at the body again, another question leaping to my mouth. Mother answered this one before I could get it out. "He was Hero of Varay. The magic of his initiation protects him now, more than it could in life. His flesh will remain whole until he is properly interred."

"But no magic can bring him back," I said. It wasn't a question.

"No magic can bring him back," Parthet agreed softly.

I moved between Mother and Parthet and walked outside, flicking off my flashlight. An appropriately chilled breeze did what grief had been unable to do, bring tears to my eyes, blur my vision. When I blinked my eyes clear, I saw Lesh and Timon, both looking apprehensive, perhaps in echo to my pain.

"The Hero of Varay is gone from us," Parthet said behind me. His voice wasn't loud, but the words seemed to hang in the air and reverberate.

Lesh was a soldier, but at that moment he was no more hardened to death than I was. Muscles rippled under the skin of his face as he fought to hide any display of grief. "We share your loss, lord," he said, and his voice nearly betrayed him. Timon cried openly, tears streaming down his face, leaving tracks in the dust we had all picked up along the way. He turned and clung to Lesh, who held his shoulders, hardly aware that the boy was there.

"What about the men he had with him?" I asked when I turned and saw that Mother had also come out of the cottage.

"The two soldiers fell with him," she said. "The squire survived. Harkane's duty is to see to Carl even in death, until he is properly laid away. I sent him on toward Basil as soon as we moved your father here and got the others buried."

"We didn't meet anyone on the road," I said.

"Likely he would have hidden at the first hint of riders," Mother said. "He was quite distraught, frightened. He was on foot, so he could hardly have reached Basil yet. I didn't know for sure that you would come. I couldn't be certain."

I shrugged to take some of the sting from my reply, but my voice left the bitterness in. "Perhaps if I had known something about Varay before this came up." I stared at Mother. She didn't say anything, but she didn't look away either. "What do we do next?" I asked.

"Take your father back to Basil, where he belongs," Mother said.

"We'll need a wagon," I said, I didn't want to just drape Dad across the saddle of a horse the way the old westerns used to show.

"There's a wagon and horse here," Mother said.

"What about the farmer? We can't just waltz off with his property."

"He has no further use for them. The Etevar's warlord laid a heavy hand around Thyme in his haste to draw your father. Dozens of people have been killed or taken as slaves. We thought there was just a small band of soldiers at Thyme, but the Etevar sent at least forty soldiers and his new wizard as well."

"Is he still here?" Parthet asked. I assumed he meant the other wizard. Mother shook her head.

"Lesh, will you hitch the wagon and bring it around?" I asked.

He bowed. "At once, Highness."

"Just back of the house, Lesh," Mother said. He bowed to her and left, taking Timon with him.

"You've learned of your heritage," Mother said to me.

"Some of it." I didn't want to talk about that yet. All it could was make me angry, and there wasn't time for that. "Can you tell me what happened here?"

"The telling takes time." We walked to a bench that leaned against the front of the cottage. Mother and I sat. Parthet stood facing us.

"We had the call for help some three weeks ago," Mother started. "Word had reached Basil that the Etevar had taken Castle Thyme again-a castle your father wrested from him once before. It was a direct challenge, a slap in the face. We knew it might be a trap, but your father left the same day. He had a good idea what he would do, what to expect. He did have more than twenty years' experience at this sort of thing. He knew how long he should be gone too. When he didn't get home or send word, I came after him. Only Harkane, his squire, was still alive. He had found this place and had started to carry your father here. They had been ambushed. Perhaps the attack on Thyme was staged just to draw your father, as we feared. The young Etevar held an old grudge over the death of his father. There were soldiers in Castle Thyme. Your father knew that, of course, but he didn't know that there were more lurking outside, waiting for him. The wizard shielded them. There was a long running battle, but time wasn't working right. That's the way Harkane explained it. The Etevar's warlord could bring out fresh troops from the castle and keep up the pressure far too long." Mother turned her head away from me.

"Are they still there?" I asked.

"There's still a garrison. I don't know if the warlord remains, but the Etevar's new wizard left before I arrived.

"We've had rumors of this new wizard in Dorthin," Parthet said. "No one knows who or what he is, but the talk is that he's a completely new force out of Fairy."

I wasn't sure what significance that might have, but I knew that my immediate future had been decided. Talking about it after the fact, it sounds like a moment of sheer stupidity, or some sort of cosmic hocus-pocus, but there was no time of considering options, no hesitation, and if it sounds like something from a bad movie script, I can't help that. Back at Castle Basil, everyone had talked about me as the Son of the Hero. The Hero was dead, though. I had a new trade now-short-term, at least. In fact, my entire future might be extremely short-term. High drama. Stirring music in the background. All that hokum. A certainty wrapped itself around me and squeezed like an anaconda. Louisville and Northwestern belonged to a past that could never be the same. For the present at least, I belonged in Varay. It wasn't even a matter of conscious choice. Maybe the decision would have been harder if there had been a special girl back home, but there wasn't, not at the moment. There were a couple I might miss from time to time, but that didn't matter. Nothing mattered outside Varay just then-at least, not outside the seven kingdoms. I had a score to settle, a Mission to complete.

One time, I asked my father why he had enlisted in the army on his eighteenth birthday. I had asked that question before. His usual response was that after years in an orphanage and in foster homes it was simply the fastest way out. This one time though, he hesitated a long time before he said, "I think I just OD'd on John Wayne movies." That made a lot more sense once I knew what he had been doing in the years since he came back from Vietnam.

When I got up off the bench and looked around slowly, I think both Parthet and Mother saw the change in me, even in the new darkness. Parthet bowed almost low enough to push a peanut along the ground with his nose. Mother stood, straightened up, and nodded. Nothing was said. A few minutes later, Lesh led up the horse and wagon. The wagon was narrow and high, with a shallow bed set completely above the wheels. It looked as if it might tip over much too easily despite the reverse camber to the wheels.

"It's sturdy enough, lord," Lesh said. "It's been well cared for."

I nodded. "I'll need your help inside, Lesh," I said. It was too late to be starting out-twilight was gone, the night's early stars were out-but I had to make the start regardless. I wouldn't stay there, so close to the enemy. Lesh followed me inside. He knelt at Father's side for a moment, then we carried him out and set him in the back of the wagon and covered him with a light blanket. Mother brought her horse, a beautiful black mare, around from the side of the cottage. She didn't want to wait either.

"Uncle Parker, you'd better drive the wagon. If the enemy's still about, we need Lesh mounted, ready to fight."

"I'm ready for different bruises," Parthet said quietly.

"I want to put some miles between us and Castle Thyme before we camp. Are we going to be able to get that wagon to the road?"

"There's a path that keeps us out of direct sight of the castle, but it goes close," Mother said. "It's the only way."

"Then we'll have to chance it," I said.

Lesh led the way after Mother made sure that he knew the route. Parthet followed with the wagon. Glory was tied behind the wagon. I put Timon up next to Glory, or as close behind as he could get on the narrow path. Mother and I brought up the rear, with her moving ahead of me when the track got too narrow for our horses to ride side by side. We rode ready for trouble. Lesh had his lance. Mother kept her bow in her hand. I left the bottom two buttons of my shirt undone so I could reach my pistol quickly. Parthet had his staff plus whatever sorceries protected a wizard.

The path was narrow but might have been designed for the wagon… or vice versa. We rode for an hour before we reached what Lesh said was the main road and turned away from the castle and what was left of the village of Thyme. In the dark, we had to ride slowly. I gave Lesh my flashlight so he could pick our path through the trickiest stretches.

I concentrated on sounds, worried that the Etevar's soldiers might waylay us as they had Dad. We couldn't go on all night without rest, but every mile we covered took us that much farther from the greatest danger. We finally left the road and moved into a narrow valley. We couldn't get far from the road with the wagon, though. And there wasn't enough light for Parthet's camping magics, so we had to put up with the bugs. We kept watches through the rest of the night, one at a time except for Timon. We let him sleep straight through, better than the rest of us managed, I think. I hardly slept at all-again. Most of the time I stared at the sky and thought about times I had shared with my father, good times, generally. We had had a lot of fun together. All those memories… but he had concealed so much too. The secrets hurt, more as the night progressed. My parents had hidden an entire life, an entire world, from me.

When dawn came I was near exhaustion, but we got moving as soon as there was any light at all. The morning's ride was silent. As the wagon wheels dragged mile after mile under them, the danger decreased, but I remained too lost in my thoughts for talk. And I was so tired that I may have dozed off and on too. At noon, we ate the freeze-dried meals I had been carrying in my pack. They didn't go far among so many of us, but we weren't hungry enough for salted beef again. That afternoon, I brought down a small deer with my bow, so we had fresh meat for the rest of our journey. It took three days to get to Basil with the wagon.

After that first morning, I learned more of my hidden heritage. Mother seemed to have a need to talk, and I was content to listen.

The title Hero of Varay was as old as the seven kingdoms. Varay was named for Vara, a legendary superhero who brought the magic out of Fairy and held the land for its more mortal inhabitants as king and hero. Traditionally then, Varay's Heroes came from outside the kingdom. A Varayan might be King's Champion, but he was never given the formal title Hero of Varay. "That's one of the reasons we kept the truth from you," Mother said. "Your father wanted you to follow in his footsteps-if you chose to. But you remained an outsider, even though you are also heir to the throne. We stopped bringing you for visits when you were five."

"Why is it so important that I be both king and Hero?"

"The two have never been united in one man since Vara. Our legends promise a new golden age when one man can again hold both titles legitimately. It may be superstitious nonsense, but I don't know of another time when it's been possible to test it."

"More of the same kind of legend that makes the Etevars want to reunite the seven kingdoms under their rule?" I asked.

"Perhaps. But Varay has never sought to dominate the other kingdoms." Maybe not. Or maybe the Varayan storytellers were just better liars.

"What about the other magic doorways at home? Where do they lead?"

"All to places in Varay," Mother said. "To Basil, Arrowroot on the Mist, Coriander in the Battle Forest at the edge of Xayber and Fairy. They lead to most of the important places in Varay."

To the edge of Fairy but not to Castle Thyme? I thought, but what I asked was, "How is it done? How do you create a doorway?"

"The easiest way requires two members of the family, one at each end, linking their efforts through the rings, bringing themselves to each other. One can do it alone, but that takes longer. You have to go to each place and implant the silver, then you have to concentrate to take yourself back through the untried passage to make it permanent. Draining work."

"Where does the silver come from?"

"It's a seaweed that grows in the shallows of the Mist, along the shore of Xayber, in Fairy."

That figured. It wouldn't be anything convenient. "Do we have a stockpile of it somewhere?"

"No. The silver must be living when it's implanted in the doorway, and it lives for only a few months after being harvested from the Mist."

There were other items. Uncle Parthet was something over a thousand years old. There was nobody around who could say definitely how much over, and he tended to be vague on the subject. His first foray into our world was well before the First Crusade. Back then, according to him, there was little to separate the three realms-mortal, buffer, and Fairy. Technology was the distancing factor. Now, the mortal realms were slow poison for creatures out of Fairy and only reachable through potent magics for people from the seven kingdoms. And Fairy was consistently hazardous to the health of all outsiders. Even Mother was twenty years older than I had thought, nearing sixty-five. She could pass for half that, easily.

"We do live longer, and the middle decades pass more slowly for our bodies," she explained. "When you were a baby, Grandfather could still lead his soldiers in battle. His hair was black and full. He had the stamina of a teenager. And he was already over a hundred years old."

That led to another question. "What about me? I'm half one world and half the other."

"According to Parthet, the blood of Vara always proves true."

We didn't speak of any future beyond our return to Basil. Until Father was properly seen to, the future had to wait.

At Nushur, people lined the road. We stopped at the inn for only a few minutes. The innkeeper's lads brought out a small keg of beer as well as bread, carrots, and potatoes to go with our venison. The innkeeper refused payment. Dad's squire had been through the village. The news had spread. When I shook the innkeeper's hand and thanked him for his wares, he went down to one knee and seemed ready to cry.

On the road past Nushur, I asked why everything was so medieval, why it was always like that in the books I read too. "What's so special about this stuff?" Mother didn't have a ready answer, but Parthet did.

"Many people have had glimpses of the truth, or memories of it. There was a time when the three realms were so intertwined that you could go from one to another as easily as you can drive from Louisville to Lexington today. For a long while, there were no obstacles. But people re-create their past every moment, just as surely as they create their futures."

"What's that supposed to mean?" I asked.

"You think that the past is rigid, unchanging history, right?"

"The interpretations may change, but the facts have to be the same."

"Not on your life, lad. Both change. The past is a fragile tissue of memories-'a lie everyone agrees on,' I think somebody in your world once said. That's very close. And when the memories change, the past changes. Some people have a greater control over their past and future than others do, but everyone participates to some degree. And the nonsense that grows out of people's heads! Your father once told me that historians now say that Richard the Lionhearted was homosexual and blame the centuries of war and distrust between France and England on a lovers' spat between Robin Hood's king and Philip of France. Nonsense! And I remember King Arthur and his queen. Arthur was no miserable warlord the way they make him out to be now. Camelot was real, and glorious."

"You were there, I suppose?" I asked, not even pretending to take this story at face value.

"Merlin was a valued friend," Parthet said, ignoring my tone.

"If all the worlds were one back then, what made it change, and when did it change?"

Parthet took a moment to think about that. "You've heard of Carolingian minuscule?" he asked. The term sounded familiar, but I couldn't place it. "The common script you write in, the lowercase letters at least. It was part of the revival of learning that the man you know as Charlemagne fostered. That's where it started." He laughed. "The pen is mightier than the sword."

People were waiting for us in the streets of Basil Town also. Sad faces watched our cortege. I had a little trouble dealing with the fact that all of these strangers were so moved by the fact of my father's death. And everyone in the castle was out and waiting in the courtyard, even King Pregel. Dad was placed on a fancy wooden stretcher type of platform and carried into the keep by four soldiers. They took him to a small chapel dedicated to the Great Earth Mother at the side of the great hall.

"At dawn," Pregel announced, "Carl Tyner, King's Champion, Hero of Varay, will be placed in the vaults of Basil with the rest of our heroes, to return to the Great Earth Mother until he is needed once more."

A vigil continued through the night, mostly in silence. I saw tears on more than one strong, rugged face. These were my father's people, not the Hendersons and McCreareys back in Louisville. The people of Basil mourned Dad as they would a brother, or their own fathers. Mother sat next to the catafalque all night, her face nearly as rigid as Dad's. I could see the pain in her eyes, though. I could feel what she was feeling. I could almost view the mourners through her eyes, and I knew it was a new magic holding me, not just some trick of my mind.

Parthet and Baron Kardeen went off together for a half hour about midnight. One or the other left now and then through the night. Virtually no one could last the entire night without at least one brief absence. The king didn't stay, but he returned often. He would stand next to my father, put his hand on Dad's shoulder, and look down at the closed eyes and pale skin. Then he would take my mother's hand and they would look at each other without speaking. Once, the king came to me and clasped my shoulders. His eyes held a terrible grief.

A bell tolled in the distance before dawn. Everyone returned to the chapel dressed for the new day. Four soldiers carried the platform. Pregel and Kardeen led the procession. Parthet, Mother, and I followed Dad. Lesh, Timon, and Dad's squire followed us. Harkane was fourteen, starting to fill out. The rest of the mourners fell into line as we followed a route marked by burning torches down steep stairs and along narrow passages below the great hall, through a cellar and down again to the royal crypt of Varay. Together in one long room the kings and heroes of Varay had their burial niches, the end of each occupied niche bearing a marble headstone with the name and dates of its occupant.

Dad's place had been prepared. The soldiers slid him into it, and a mason sealed the headstone in place. A purple banner was draped across the front. Pregel stood in front of the purple and looked around at the rest of us.

"Our Hero is dead," he announced, his voice echoing eerily in the catacombs,"but we have a new Hero at hand: Gil Tyner, Prince of Varay, heir designate, son of the Hero." He looked at me.

"Step forward and kneel before the king," Parthet whispered urgently. I did as he said. There was no time to think anything through.

"Son of my granddaughter, son of my Hero, king who will be," Pregel intoned. Baron Kardeen put a sword with jewel-encrusted hilt in the king's hand.

"Hold out your hands with the rings up," Parthet's voice hissed in my ear-even though he was standing back with my mother, ten feet away.

I held out my hands. The king touched me on each shoulder with the flat of the sword, then he touched the edge of the blade to each ring in turn, starting a burning in my hands. When he held the sword sideways and touched both rings simultaneously with the blade, sparks flew from the points of contact, as if the rings were the poles of a car battery. It was an electric charge: I felt it.

"May the magic of Vara sustain you. May the Great Earth Mother clasp you to her breasts. May your sword never know defeat. May your soul never taste shame. Rise, Prince Gil, Hero of Varay."

Pregel returned the fancy sword to Kardeen and then took my hands in his when I stood. There was an electric crackling through the crypt, a smell of brimstone, and it felt as if all the hair on my head and body was standing on end. Pregel's eyes burned into mine. Then he released my hands and hugged me-with considerable force.

"We have need of a Hero," he said aloud. Then he whispered, "We have need of you," close to my ear.

While we climbed back to the great hall, maybe eight or ten normal floors up, I could feel the magic settling in my body-it was as if new parts were being put into place.

It scared the crap out of me.