Son of the Hero

9 – Arrowroot

I didn't have any solid plans when I stepped back through to Castle Basil. I hadn't been consciously thinking about Varay's problems. At the start, I was too upset to worry about them, and later there was the bomb in New York to occupy my mind. But once I decided to go back, a few basic premises clicked to the front of my central processing unit. Maybe some of that training that Dad had insisted on over the years was finally taking over. I might be the rookie, but Dad had drilled all of that military nonsense into me. One thing was obvious. Hero or not, there was no way one man could handle a two-front war. I had to either make sure that the Varayan army only had to face one enemy or find a way to get that army back and forth between fronts fast enough to keep both enemies at bay without wearing out our troops. That's how the Saxons lost England to William the Bastard, among other examples. It may still be impossible for anyone to be in two places at the same time, even in a magical world, but maybe we could come close enough for government work. I had an idea… one idea.

There was no one in "my" bedroom in Castle Basil. I didn't see anyone until I entered the great hall. A dozen or so people were lounging around or working-including Lesh, who was draining a tankard of beer.

"Where's Parthet?" I asked loudly. That got everyone's attention. But nobody knew where the wizard was, so I went to check his room in the castle and then headed for Baron Kardeen's office. Lesh stayed with me, but I moved too quickly to give him a chance to ask the questions I could see he wanted to spring.

Parthet was just leaving Kardeen's office when I got there.

"We need to talk right now," I said, "somewhere private. And we need that big map."

Parthet nodded. "Kardeen has the map." We got it and went up a circular stairway to a room above the chamberlain's office in the tower. I told Lesh to stay at the door and make sure we weren't disturbed by anyone but Kardeen, the king, or my mother. I couldn't have excluded them if I wanted to.

Inside, Parthet unrolled the map across a table that was much too small for it. The ends of the map drooped toward the floor.

"First off, I need to know more about the magic doorways," I said. "Can I take other people through them?"

"Once you open the way, anyone can use it-while you hold it open."

"How do I open a new passage?"

"First, you line the doorways on each end with sea-silver. If there are two of us available-and there are only four of us who wear the twin rings now-one stands at either end of the passage, rings on the silver. Then we have to concentrate on each other until the connection opens and we're face-to-face. It usually only takes a few seconds, or seems like it. If you have to open a passage alone, you line the first door with silver, then look through the way you'll see the room or whatever from the other end. Fix that scene firmly in your mind while holding the rings against the silver. Then you have to go to the other end-the hard way, I'm afraid-line the door there, put the rings against the silver, and concentrate on the room at the other end until it appears. Then you step through to fix the passage."

"Where do I get the silver and how do I attach it to the door?"

"Getting the silver is the snag," Parthet said. "It grows only in the Mist, off certain beaches along the Isthmus of Xayber." He pointed out several locations near the top of the map. The map showed only the nearest portion of the isthmus-I guess the part that sometimes became part of the border or something. "There are probably other areas, but those are the ones I know of, the nearest ones."

"Behind enemy lines."

"Yes," Parthet agreed. "But once you have the weed, attaching it is simple. Start at the floor with one end and press it in place. If the first strand isn't long enough, just overlap the ends the least little bit. The sea-silver adheres easily. You just have to make sure that it remains wet from the time you harvest it until you use it."

"I don't suppose there's a doorway leading to one of those beaches?"

Parthet shook his head. "It's unlikely that this magic would work in lands dominated by Fairy anyway."

"What's the nearest point to those beaches that I can reach by doorway?"

"Castle Arrowroot at the edge of Battle Forest and the Mist, where our north shore meets isthmus."

"How long will it take me to get to the silver and back to Arrowroot?" One day, I would have to ask why all the castles were named after spices, but not right then.

"Eight days if everything goes perfectly, and nothing ever goes perfectly for mortals inside Fairy. Ten days is a more realistic minimum, and two weeks is yet more likely-if you can make it in and back at all. That's never certain even in peacetime. And the Elflord of Xayber will know when you enter his lands."

"Tell me about him." I studied the map while I listened to Parthet. The map was almost devoid of detail for the isthmus, not much help at all.

"There's little enough I can tell," Parthet said. "He's an elflord, quite literally larger than life. No one in the seven kingdoms knows his real name. Likely no one outside him immediate family has ever known it. Like most creatures of Fairy, he considers his name his most closely guarded secret, lest it be used to conjure spells against him. He is apparently something of a rebel in Fairy, even by their loose standards, refusing to acknowledge the authority of their king-the Elfking. But they take no action against him unless he raids the domains of other elflords. That's pretty standard for that lot-'I don't give a damn what you do as long as you don't do it to me.' Xayber has a motley army of human renegades and fairy creatures. Freebooters, brigands. Xayber has powerful magics at his command and a deep hatred for all the people of the seven kingdoms, even the turncoats who serve him."

"Can we get him to leave us alone for a time? Will he agree to a truce?"

Parthet snorted. "The only way you could get him to leave us alone would be to kill him, except that he probably can't be killed, not by a mortal. The only thing that might deflect his attention from us even for a short time would be an attack on his lands by another elflord, and that is unlikely."

"How long would it take to ride from Arrowroot to Castle Thyme?"

"Four days if you ride like a host of demons is at your back. Four and half, maybe five, if you want to make sure your horse survives the ride."

"I'd be better off coming back here to start the ride."

"Or here." Parthet stabbed his finger at the map. "Castle Coriander, inside Battle Forest. It has part of our army too, and you could make it to Thyme from Coriander almost as quickly as from here."

I continued to stare at the map, focusing hard. I don't have a photographic memory, but I wanted to absorb as much of the map as I could. Parthet waited patiently. There might be time, if I could do anything right in the north.

"Can you get a message through to the Elfking with your magic?" I asked. Something Parthet had said a couple of minutes before had given me a second idea-if it was worth anything.

Parthet had to think about it. "I'm not sure, but it may be possible. I've never tried to communicate directly with anyone in Fairy."

"You have a pen and paper?"

He dug out the pad and pen he had used at the inn in Nushur. I wrote large, thinking of Parthet's poor eyesight, and used several pages of the pad to finish my note.

"The activities of the Elflord of Xayber are already causing major disruptions in the mortal world beyond the buffer zone. His assaults on the seven kingdoms threaten the stability of your realm also. He seeks this chaos to make possible his usurpation of your throne. Gil Tyner, Hero of Varay. "

I gave the pad to Parthet, and he read it with some difficulty, moving his arm in and out until the letter focused for him.

"Is any of this true?" he asked when he finished reading.

"Most of it, I think." I told him about the nuclear bomb. "The rest seems likely as well, don't you think?"

"It's possible, perhaps possible enough to start something."

"If you can get the message to the Elf king."

"I'll do what I can."

"Now, suppose we reconvene the meeting I broke up yesterday."

I didn't say anything about my abrupt departure or the reasons for it. I did tell everyone about the nuclear bomb in New York and my guess that it was related to events in the buffer zone. The others all nodded. Even King Pregel seemed to understand the implications of nuclear weapons. There might not be TV or radio in the buffer zone-not even a newspaper as far as I knew-but that didn't mean that the elite was totally ignorant of our world. They couldn't afford to be.

"I'll try to get the Elflord of Xayber off our backs, if just for a few weeks, so we can concentrate on the Etevar," I said. "I've given Parthet a message to send to the Elf king. I'm going after sea-silver. If I get a chance, I may spend a day or two pretending to be the army of some other elflord marauding in Xayber." That last was a throwaway, a chance thought that came while I was talking. It sounded pompous as hell, but nobody even blinked.

"If I can sidetrack Xayber, so much the better. We can use the sea-silver to move the army east to meet the Etevar. If I can't sidetrack the elflord, the silver becomes even more important. We'll set up passages from Arrowroot and Coriander to Thyme so we can move troops back and forth to cover both fronts. When I get back from the isthmus with the sea-silver, I'll set up the doorways at the northern castles, then ride to Thyme, to that cottage in the orchard, to set up the other end. With me there and either Parthet or Mother handling the doors in the northern castles, we can keep the passages open for the troop movements." I gave them a moment. There were no questions. The Hero was speaking words of salvation. They were eating it up. It gave me a sick feeling.

"In the meantime, it might be wise to strip the rest of the kingdom of every possible fighting man and move them east."

"It sounds risky, but it's the only chance we've seen that offers any hope af all," Pregel said when I paused again.

Heaven help us all, I thought. But I took it as a go-ahead.

"Mother, there's one thing you need to do while I'm gone. First thing Monday morning, take Uncle Parthet-hog-tie and drag him if you have to-to Louisville. Take him to one of those one-hour eyeglass places. Get his eyes tested and buy him a half-dozen pairs of unbreakable, unscratchable glasses with those neck chains to keep him from losing them off his face." Parthet looked embarrassed, more so when the rest of them laughed.

"Uncle," I said, putting my hand on his shoulder, "we need you at your very best for this. We may need every magic you know before it's over. And since you need to see well to do your magics, cracked eighty-year-old glasses just won't cut it."

"You're right, of course," Parthet said sheepishly. "I should have done long ago, but I never find the time."

"Is there anything else we need to do right away?" Pregel asked. His willingness to defer to my plans so easily, so completely, gave me mixed feelings. It was heartening that he trusted me, but it was also discouraging, to say the least. If the wild ideas of a novice were the best Varay could manage, we were in deep trouble.

"People, weapons, and food," I said. "As much as we can start moving east, I'd say. And whatever authorization I'm going to need to get things moving in the north. Those people don't know me."

"I'll prepare a warrant for the royal seal," Kardeen said.

"You go with the full authority of the crown," Pregel added.

A damn blank check. That gave me more chills. But there wasn't much more to be said right then. I went off with Mother and Parthet to learn what I could about the inherent magic of being Hero of Varay. They couldn't tell me much. There was the greater awareness of danger that had been mentioned before. The magic was also supposed to convey something of the strength and skill of Vara, first of the line, the mystical hero-king whose golden age I was supposed to bring back.

"Your father was secretive," Mother said in answer to my complaint. "He told me that he couldn't explain most of the magic, that it might weaken it. You may be able to pull off your deception in Xayber. It's a guess, but from hints I picked up over the years, that magic may deceive an elflord at a distance. For a time. Not forever."

"The magic grows on you, with you," Parthet said. "That is the ancient wisdom, and your father said it was accurate."

It wasn't much. I decided to go to Arrowroot in the morning after a couple of good Basilier meals and a night's sleep. When I got to my room, I found that my entourage had grown. Harkane, Dad's squire, was waiting with the others. When I entered the room, Harkane came to me and went down on one knee.

"I would be honored to serve you as I served your father," he said. There was no way to refuse-especially after Lesh told me that the king had sent Harkane.

We all went to the great hall to eat, and when we got back upstairs after we finished-about two hours later-I told my people what we were going to be doing for the next couple of weeks. "Timon, you'll be okay here while we're gone," I added.

"My place is with you, lord," he said.

"Not this time. We ride to war, to Fairy and Dorthin. It's no place for a boy your age." He argued longer than Lesh or Parthet would have. Even when I made it a flat order, Timon sulked.

"You did right, lord," Harkane said when we were more or less alone. "Your father always left his page behind when the danger was greatest also." I felt that it was a presumptuous remark for a squire new to "my service," but I was glad he'd made it. Varay was still strange to me. I thought that by local standards. Timon might be right, that he did belong with me, even on such a ridiculously dangerous mission. But there was no way I was going to haul a kid his age along on what might be as suicidal a quest as my father's last one.

I lay awake for a long time that night, second-guessing my decision to return to Varay, and trying to put together a more solid plan for its defense. But no matter how I stirred the mix, I was going to have to ad-lib most of it, and that didn't feel very smart to me. The algorithm was full of bugs. After midnight I got up and headed down to the crypt. Alone. I managed to get out of the room without waking the others by taking the scenic route. I stepped back into my parents' bedroom in Louisville, went down to the basement, and stepped back through to a different part of the castle. Some of the rigmarole was sinking in. I took my sword and knife along. I strapped on the belt almost without thinking. The Hero of Varay must be armed.

The route to the crypt wasn't as brightly lit as it had been for the funeral procession, but there were occasional torches along the way, even one inside the burial chamber-fresh, so someone took care to keep a light burning there.

I don't think I went down there to communicate with the dead. I never believed that was possible. I'm not sure why I headed almost instinctively for the crypt that night. Maybe Hamlet was working on my head again. A stone-carver had been at work, preparing the headstone on the new niche. Dad's name was finished, but not the dates. I put my hands against the stone. Cold marble. In my mind, I talked to Dad, told him what I was planning to try, confessed that I was scared, that I didn't see how I could possibly pull it off. No matter what kind of front I put on for the living folks upstairs, I still didn't know what I was doing, I was scared, and I wanted to run for home and try to forget the whole nightmare.

Dad didn't answer.

It was appropriately chilly in the crypt, and I got hungry almost at once, as ghoulish as that might sound. But I didn't leave. I was in no real hurry to get out of the crypt, and that surprised me.

It was eerie. The slightest noise echoed over and over, forcing me to pay attention, to look around me almost constantly, as if someone might sneak up on me down there.

I looked at the capstones on the other niches. There were a lot of them. The dates weren't A.D. or B.C., so I couldn't place them absolutely, but the numbers ranged from a high of 3713 down to a death date of 177 on the stone labeled Vara, right in the center. Looking at the wall, it was kings to the left and Heroes to the right.

Something happened. I don't have any idea what it was-something just inside my head, I think. I hope. I got so frightened, though, that I almost chickened out and ran for home again. When I could control the panic, I forced myself to stand there and look at the wall of burial niches again. I wondered where they would put me when the time came, if I served as both Hero and king. Which end would be mine? Or would they start using the other wall and put me in the middle opposite Vara? Gloomy thoughts in a gloomy place. Of course, the odds looked good that the question wouldn't arise. I might easily end up in the vault before Pregel. I assumed that that would put me next to my father, or just above him.

Gil Tyner, King of Varay? It sounded crazy, absurd. There was a surrealistic air about the entire situation. That feeling was as dangerous as the Elflord of Xayber or the Etevar of Dorthin. Maybe I hoped that standing in the crypt where we had buried the last Hero would help etch the reality in my mind. How can you prepare for mortal danger, make it feel as real as it has to feel? I didn't have a drill sergeant to scream at me, or banner headlines in newspapers and network anchormen wailing about a war. No jingoistic propaganda, no visible evidence of the danger but that stone on my father's burial niche.

I guess I spent a couple of hours there, standing before the rows and layers of dead kings and heroes while my mind drifted wherever it wanted to go. Part of the time I thought about things Dad and I had done together. At times I could almost hear him talking to me-memory-talking, not spirit-talking-bits of lessons he had taught me, even some of the corny jokes he liked to tell just to hear people groan. I tried to come to grips with my resentment over the secret life my parents had led. Maybe all parents lead lives their children don't know about, but this was something more than a teenager's shock at learning that his "ancient" parents still enjoyed sex.

There was no way to recover the years of lies, no way I could change my own past to include Varay-despite Parthet's philosophy of history. Maybe I couldn't even extinguish the resentment I felt, but I couldn't let it fester. Forgive and forget? Not exactly. I wasn't ready to tell Mother, "That's all right what you did to me," because it wasn't. And I certainly didn't expect to forget.

I was as trapped as any of the people in those burial niches, and I was still alive to suffer the frustration of the trap.

Finally, I climbed the stairs back to my room. I even slept for a time, and this time there were no dreams. After a hearty breakfast and a round of farewells, I opened the passage to Castle Arrowroot and stepped through with Lesh and Harkane.

My war was about to start.