Authors: Gene Wolfe

Castleview (23 page)

BOOK: Castleview

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RESCUE PARTY

“OH, IT is a grand old city,” sang Shields,

“In the fine old country style.
A credit to the County Down,
The pride of the Emerald Isle.
It has the finest harbor,
For the bread carts to sail in.
And if ever you sail to Ireland,
You’ll sail by Magheralin.”

“Willie, I do wish you’d stop that.”

“’Tis the custom of the Irish,” Shields told his wife, “to sing loudly before going into battle.”

Wrangler twisted around in his seat to look at him. “You expecting a fight?”

Shields nodded.

Ann said, “Negotiate, Willie. You know, just like selling a car.”

“To negotiate,” Shields observed, “one must have something to offer in return. I have a new car, the customer has dollars. I’ll undercut the sticker if he’ll take the deluxe trim package with air conditioning, finance through us, and so forth. What, exactly, are we going to offer the Deeny Shee?”

“Who in the world—?”

“The Fair Folk, Ann. The People of Peace. We’ve been sold a bill of goods.”

The old Cherokee swung off onto the road leading to Baker’s knob.

From the front seat Wrangler said, “Reckon we got the same idea—he’s one himself. That what you’ve been thinkin’?”

Shields nodded. “One of whatever they really are. Or else he’s working for them.”

“Willie! That nice doctor?”

“The nice expert who showed up just when we needed such an expert? Yes. The nice doctor who told us that fairies can make themselves look like somebody we know but never bothered to make any of us prove we’re who we say we are, and who’s sending seven people off in a couple of cars to bring back four more. Can you imagine squeezing all eleven of us into these two cars, even if one’s a child?” Shields recalled the huge and hairy creature he had wrestled in the barn and shuddered. “The nice doctor who’s taken us off fairy hunting without weapons.”

“Why’d you come, then?” Wrangler asked.

“Because the only way we’ve got any chance of getting Merc back is to walk into the trap and break out,” Shields told him.

Wrangler nodded. “Makes sense.”

“I sure as hell hope so.”

“Only you’re more’n a hair off about not havin’ any guns.” Wrangler’s hand dipped into his denim jacket and emerged with a long-barreled revolver, displayed it, and replaced it.

Ann’s mouth formed a little 0, but Shields grinned. “Good for you, Wrangler. We may need that.”

“I only fetched it out ‘cause he told me,” Wrangler said. “Back when Miss Lisa here and the other ladies was fixin’ tea and coffee and suchlike, remember? He took me off to the side, sort of, and said he knew I’d lost my thirty-thirty, but did I maybe have another gun? And I told him, yep, I got this’un, it used to be my brother Bart’s. Bart went off lookin’ for gold in the Superstitions, and nobody ever did find him. But he left a
lot of his stuff back home ‘cause of not wantin’ to load up too heavy, and this was part of it. It’s a Smith and Wesson forty-four special, and you can drive tacks with it if you can hold it steady enough.”

The battered Cherokee had been laboring hard to carry four people up the steep and narrow road, its manual transmission in second arid its accelerator pedal nearly to the floor. Now Lisa eased back on it. “They’re going to stop, I think.” The brake lights of the Oldsmobile flared, and she swung onto the shoulder behind it.

In a moment more von Madadh was tapping at her window, and she rolled it down.

“We are here,” he announced. “I have a flashlight, and I had planned to search for Mercedes’s mysterious shortcut at this point; but I saw it as we drove up, so there’s no need for that. Mr. Shields, Mrs. Shindler, Ms. Solomon—can any of you shoot? Do you know how to handle a gun?”

Shields nodded, and Lisa said, “I’ve shot a little skeet.”

“Excellent. I didn’t want to worry you before we left, but I’ve borrowed several weapons from Mrs. Howard. Her late husband was something of a hunter, it seems. I think it might be useful for anybody who understands such matters—I confess I don’t—to have one. So if you would be so kind … ?”

Shields and Lisa got out. Bob Roberts had already unlocked the trunk of the Oldsmobile and chosen a bolt-action deer rifle with a telescopic sight. “I’ll take this,” he said, “if nobody minds. I gave it to Tom, and I know it’s a good one.”

The interior of the trunk was illuminated by a tiny bulb in the lid. Von Madadh said, “perhaps you should have the shotgun, Ms. Solomon. It’s what’s called a pump action, I believe.”

Lisa nodded and took it, flicked the safety off, opened the breech enough to see that there were shells in the magazine but none in the chamber, and shut the breech again.

That left a semiautomatic twenty-two rifle for Shields. He jacked a round into the chamber and put on the safety.

“Mrs. Howard has agreed to drive as I direct,” von Madadh explained. “But I have warned her that it may be frightening, and suggested that it might be better to have another, bolder, driver—”

Ann tapped his shoulder. “Willie used to drive in races.”

“Really?” Von Madadh looked around at her. “Then if you wouldn’t object to being separated … ?”

“Not if it’s going to help get Mercedes back,” Ann declared virtuously. Knowing it was her way of getting even with him for being wrong about the guns, Shields grinned at her.

Von Madadh said, “You must drive exactly as I instruct you, is that agreed? No matter how dangerous it may appear. I’ll be sitting alongside you, and it will be just as dangerous for me.”

Shields nodded, wondering whether it was really so.

Sally Howard’s Oldsmobile was enough like his own Buick to make him feel that there was something subtly wrong about the location of its controls. Recalling what Mercedes had told him, it seemed possible it would not even start.

“Back out,” von Madadh directed him. “The turnoff is a few yards back.”

Shields put the Olds into reverse and backed out onto the road, hoping that no one was coming down from the summit fast. They crept forward in Drive until von Madadh pointed. “There! You see it?”

“No.”

“Go slowly till I tell you to turn, then turn sharply.”

From the rear seat, Roberts said, “He’s going to be going down one heck of a steep slope.”

Von Madadh glanced back at him. “See, Bob, you’re afraid. Sally would have been, too.”

Shields began, “I still don’t—”

“Now! Between those big trees!”

There was no trace of any road that Shields could see, and the grade seemed close to seventy-five percent. He wrenched the wheel anyway, his foot stamping the brakes, and felt the Olds pick up speed despite them. There was bare clearance
between the trunks; for a moment the right chrome strip scraped bark.

A track—very faint—veered to the right. Shields braked hard and threw the Olds into a skid-turn that brought the steel barrel of the twenty-two into painful contact with his elbow.

“Good!” von Madadh exclaimed. “Great!”

From the rear seat, Sally Howard called, “I don’t know if they’re following us. Yes! Here they come.”

“That Solomon girl’s got real guts,” Shields said. To himself he added that she also had four-wheel drive.

The road appeared almost distinct now, but it seemed to him that it was less a real trail pressed by tires than an ephemeral pattern in the dew; dewdrops sparkled everywhere, shining in his lights like millions of diamonds. He assured himself that this was because it was the northern face of the hill, though he was by no means certain it was true.

“Careful!” von Madadh barked.

Slanted itself and running slantwise over the steep slope, slippery and ever at the point of vanishing, it seemed that the road could not get worse. Abruptly it did—but better, too, gaining a graveled surface as it plunged straight down the hill.

“Slower!”

Shields shook his head. “If I hit the brakes here, we’ll skid and roll.”

A sudden turn would finish them now; but if there were a sudden turn on this stretch, the road would be unusable—and it was plainly used.

Not a turn, a Y.

“Right!” von Madadh yelled.

Another swerve, another sickening skid with gravel rolling beneath the wheels. Then, suddenly, the road was almost level and nearly straight, dividing an ancient forest from an unfenced meadow.

Conversationally, Shields asked, “How did you know to turn right? Have you been here before?”

Von Madadh shook his head. “I could see that the left was sharper, that’s all. I doubt that we could have made it.”

Sally announced, “I thought they were going to turn over, but they’re still behind us.”

“I thought
we
were going to turn over,” Shields told her.

Roberts said apologetically, “This’s someplace I don’t know at all, and I’d have sworn I’d walked over every acre for twenty miles around Castleview.”

Von Madadh’s smile was grim. “I don’t think that this is ‘wonted ground,’ as we like to call it, Mr. Roberts. Here we’re ‘under the hill,’ and if we hadn’t gone between that particular pair of trees, I don’t believe we could have come here at all.”

Shields had lowered his window, letting in the night air as a living wind, although they had slowed to thirty miles an hour. It was as cool and damp as the air of the wooded hillside they had left behind; yet it possessed a quality that hinted that it was a different atmosphere altogether, purified, so it seemed, by a different sun—by a star younger or older than Earth’s own, but whether older or younger not quite the same. It had owls in it, and bats rowed it with fingered wings; but these owls and these bats, Shields felt, might upon any given night join forces in some dark common cause.

A human hand running upon its fingertips scuttled across the road, briefly dead-white in the headlights. “This is the place, Rex,” Shields said. “I don’t understand how you knew, but you were right.”

“I noticed the trees first,” von Madadh told him. “Gnarled trees like those are generally called elf oaks or witch elms in the British Isles. Then I saw that the growth between them had been crushed not long ago. You’re correct, I think—this is the place that our Institute has been trying to locate for more than twenty years.”

Sally Howard leaned forward. “They’re flashing their lights. I think they want us to stop.”

Shields nodded. “Okay with me.” He braked the Olds to a
gentle halt. There was no shoulder to pull onto here, but he doubted that they would be troubled by traffic.

Sally said, “Don’t switch off our lights. Please?”

“All right.” Shields himself had much the same feeling. Lisa’s headlights grew in his darkened mirror, stopped, and winked out.

Roberts was already out of the car. “I’m going to wait in here,” Sally announced.

Von Madadh nodded. “As you wish.” He opened his door and joined Roberts.

Shields got out as well, though like Sally he would have preferred to remain in the car. He left the headlights on and the engine running, and he checked the safety of the twenty-two nervously as he walked back to the Cherokee.

Through an open window, Ann called, “We saw something, Willie!”

Shields smiled; Ann did not want to leave the protection of her vehicle either.

Lisa and Wrangler had both gotten out, Lisa carrying Tom Howard’s twelve-gauge. Wrangler’s right hand was at his side; his big revolver was in it, pointed sensibly toward the ground. Lisa blurted, “We saw a—well, a giant, if you want to call it that. A terribly tall man, or maybe a woman.”

“Was he on horseback?” Von Madadh’s voice cracked like a whip. “Where?”

Lisa shook her head. “No, he was standing at the edge of the road, about three-quarters of a mile back. He—it—was all hairy, we thought, and—”

Roberts nudged Shields, then von Madadh, and pointed.

To their left the forest gave way to a clearing of perhaps twelve acres, full of ferns and tall grasses dripping with dew and milky moonlight. On its farther side, barely beneath the first branches of the first trees, a large man—it was difficult to judge just how big he really was—sat a large horse. By some witchery of the moon, the eyes of both appeared to glow.

“That’s him!” von Madadh shouted. “Shoot, Roberts!
Quick!”

While Shields was still deciding whether to fire, he heard the snick of the bolt. Bob threw his rifle to his shoulder.

The shot and the horse’s bound seemed to come at the same instant. There was a flash of polished steel in the moonlight, then horse and horseman were gone.

FROM STONE

JUDY DID not like the tall man. He was scary, as she phrased it to herself, and she did not want to go anywhere with him even if Sissy went too, especially not on any great big horse that stood up sometimes. Under her breath she said, “Well, I like ponies!” as she backed away. There was a funny bush growing out of the crack between two cobblestones, and she slipped behind it.

At once a voice hissed, “So you desire to leave them? Then come with me!” A blond lady not a lot taller than Judy herself laid a hand on Judy’s shoulder.

“They’ll see us,” Judy whispered.

“They will not see you as long as you are with me,” the lady assured her. “Come! Walk soft.”

Quite suddenly Judy realized that the blond lady was right. For some reason, neither Sissy, nor the tall man, nor even the horse, would look where they were, though they might look all round them. “It’s magic, isn’t it?” Judy said.

Morgan smiled and nodded, and led her to a small door in the base of a different tower.

Seth had taken off one shoe and was using it to pound the bars of their cell door; the shoe was a rubber-soled Adidas and quite light, yet he managed to make a fair amount of noise.
Mercedes watched him for a while, then turned back to the window.

The cat was nowhere to be seen. The beach below was empty save for waves that marched in one after another to crash on the sand or smash against boulders. The dark, blue-green sea beyond displayed neither smoke nor sail. Mercedes counted more than a hundred waves before she gave up.

“He’s going to bring us something to eat,” Seth reported.

She turned away from the window. “Is it Dr. von Madadh?”

Seth shook his head. “A little guy. I’ve never seen him before.”

“You know,” Mercedes glanced away, back toward the bright rectangles of the window, “sooner or later I’m going to have to go to the bathroom.”

“Sure. I won’t watch, honest.” Seth hesitated. “You want me to ask if we can’t have separate cells?”

“I think …”

She was saved by the rasp of a key in the lock. The door flew open, kicked by a hairy dwarf balancing a wooden trencher; a still hairier giant lurked in the gloom behind him. “Here,” said the dwarf. He set down the trencher, shoved it with a bare foot, and slammed the door.

“Okay,” Seth said, “I’ll ask him. But first let’s eat.”

Mercedes nodded, suddenly conscious that she was ravenously hungry, and eager for any diversion that would give her time to bring her emotions under control. “I like you,” she told him. “Honest, it’s not because I don’t.”

Seth held her uninjured arm as she sat down on the straw-strewn floor next to the trencher. “I know,” he said. “I like you, too, Merc.”

She looked up with tear-bright eyes. “My dad’s the only one who ever calls me that.”

“Your dad and me, we call you Merc. What’d they call you where you went to school before?”

Feeling better already, she wiped her eyes on her sleeve.
“The teachers said ‘Mercedes.’ I guess the other kids called me ‘Hyphen’ mostly.”

Seth sat down beside her. “I like Merc better.”

“So do I,” she said.

There were rolls, a soft and somewhat runny cheese, a small pot of honey, and a dusty bottle. “No glasses,” Seth reported, happy to change the subject. “No knife to spread the cheese and stuff with either.”

“I guess we’re supposed to eat with our fingers.”

“That means I get twice as much.” He grinned at her.

She tried to smile. “That’s okay.”

“No, we’ll share out.” He picked up the cheese and broke it into two, giving her the larger half. “You can have all the honey—I don’t like it.”

“All right, I’ll take it.” She broke her half cheese and gave one piece to him. “For your half.”

“Okay.” He gave her two rolls, keeping two for himself, then sniffed the bottle. “I don’t like wine much, either, but that’s all there is.”

“Me neither. Is it sour?”

“I don’t know—smells yeasty. You want to drink first?”

“Sure.” She took the dusty bottle from him, held it to her lips, and tilted it back.

The wine was like a meadow in springtime. Every wildflower flourished there—buttercups and daisies, violets white or blue, dog rose, foxglove, a hundred more. She knew them all. A wren trilled in her ears, and a wind from the south ruffled her hair. Half afraid, she put down the bottle and wiped her mouth. The cell spun about her; Seth was a bronze giant with eyes torn from a summer sky; the bandages were unworthy of his face.

“Wow!” he said. “
That
good?”

“I guess I was thirsty.”

Mercedes saw him raise the bottle, but only as she saw the light that streamed through the window and the dust motes that danced in that light. The odor of honey was intoxicating; she had never known how hungry she was, how hungry she had
been all her life. She dipped a roll into the honey, and it was nectar and ambrosia.

The key turned in the lock, which squealed in climax. The heavy door swung back, and the cat entered with the key in his left front paw and a long gilded walkingstick with a gold tassel in his right. “Chère Mademoiselle,” he began, bowing gracefully, “permit me please to introduce myself. I am none other than the celebrated G. Gordon Kitty, formerly of the FBI and the CIA, the protector and companion—the confidant, if I may say it—of Lady Judith Youngberg.”

“Mercedes Schindler-Shields.” Mercedes extended her hand to the cat, who kissed it. “This is—”

“Lady Judith’s cousin; we have crossed swords in the past.” The cat smiled the slight, superior smile of the victor and gave Seth a barely perceptible bow. “We have, I say, crossed swords; but the time has come to put petty disputes behind us. Blood is thicker than cream, as the aphorists have it. You must escape. We must rejoin Lady Judith and see her home. Are you ready? Or would you, perhaps, prefer to complete your collation?”

Lady Judy herself was brushing Queen Morgan’s golden hair. “I don’t understand about you,” she said. “I don’t understand about this whole place.”

Morgan smiled. “While you understand your own place with a clarity of inner vision that is the despair of philosophers, I am sure.”

“Huh-uh,” Judy said, and Morgan laughed.

For a moment or three Judy tried to think of a good way to explain, and at last she said, “What I don’t understand is how they fit together. Why this is here, and that’s there.”

“Blind chance,” Morgan told her.

Judy brushed some more. It was supposed to be work—she was a Lady in Waiting, and this was one of the things Ladies in Waiting did—but she rather enjoyed it. Morgan’s hair was so fine that an individual hair was completely invisible; it could be seen only when several hairs lay together. Judy knew her own
was nowhere near as pretty, and she had an ill-defined feeling that if she brushed Morgan’s enough, she might learn how to make her own nicer.

After she had lost count of the strokes several times, she asked, “Why did you want to hurt your brother?” though she knew that sisters usually did.

“I did not wish to hurt him,” Morgan told her. “I wished to kill him—a very different thing. I only hurt him because he irritated me by remaining alive, or because I was trying to kill him in that way or this and did not quite succeed.”

“But he died in the end?”

“Not wholly.”

Judy continued to brush while she digested that. “I think you really loved him.”

Morgan whirled so quickly it seemed a trick. “I did! Oh, yes, I did! Don’t you know the legend of the three queens? Or the lady in the lake? Or the sword in the stone?”

Judy shook her head. “Are those stories?”

“Yes, wonderful stories! But first I must tell you how my brother and I came to be. Our father was merely a vulgar petty chieftain, one of those half-Christian Celts the Romans left in their wake like candy wrappers. His mother was a common duchess, but mine was a merrow. I doubt you know what a merrow is.”

“You don’t mean the gray stuff inside a soup bone?”

“Hardly.” Morgan rose quickly (she seemed to do everything suddenly) and strode to the window, where she stood looking out at the water. “To explain I would have to tell you much more—how three brothers drew lots for the four quarters of this world from a helmet, and all that. Do you know anything about fairies, little Judith?”

“Not if you’re one,” Judy said.

“Well expressed. I was going to say that the merrows are sea fairies, and so we are. We are the Oceanids, descended of Tethys and Oceanus, and we live under the sea.”

“You don’t,” Judy pointed out.

“Oh, but I do, little Judith, when I wish.” It seemed to Judy almost as though it were the water itself who spoke.

“I have many homes; some are under the sea, others beneath lakes. But I meant to tell you that when my brother was a babe, a meteorite with a sword through it fell white-hot to earth. As you probably know, there used to be another world beyond the one your people have named for your god of defence. She died long ago, and her people perished with her, most of them. This sword was their work. It had become partially encased in molten rock, I imagine.”

Judy said, “And only the Right King of England could pull it out! I know, I saw it on TV.”

Morgan glanced back at her and smiled. “And yet some say children receive scant education these days. There was no such entity as England then—but that is another matter. Yes, my brother drew out the sword. He called it Excalibor, which means ‘from stone.’ It was the product of an advanced metallurgy, you understand, vastly superior to anything anybody has here.”

Though she did not understand
metallurgy
, Judy said, “Uhhuh.”

“He lost it, of course. You mortals have poor memories and you’re horribly careless. I found it and threw it in my closet, and later I gave it back to him. Then when he had lost his last battle, in drowned Leonnesse where he was born, he sent it to me for safekeeping.”

After a moment Judy shook her head. “I don’t think that’s a very good story.”

Eyes wide, Morgan spun about. “
So all day long the noise of battle rolled, among the mountains by the winter sea; until King Arthur’s Table, man by man, had fallen in Lyonesse about their lord King Arthur. Then, because his wound was deep, the bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him, and bore him to a chapel nigh the field, a broken chancel with a broken cross, that stood on a dark strait of barren land: on one side lay the Ocean, and on one lay a great water, and the moon was full.”

Very much frightened by all this, Judy shouted, “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to make you mad.”

Morgan crouched until her lips were level with Judy’s own, and whispered,
“Such a sleep they sleep—the men I loved.” Her voice was as lonely as the cries of the gulls. “I think that we shall never more, at any future time, delight our souls with talk of knightly deeds, walking about the gardens and the halls of Camelot, as in the days that were. perish by this people which I made—though Merlin swore that I should come again to rule once more; but, let what will be, be, am so deeply smitten thro’ the helm that without help I cannot last till morn. Thou therefore take my brand Excalibur, which was my pride: for thou rememberest how in those old days, one summer noon, an arm rose up from out the bosom of the lake, clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, holding the sword—and how I rowed across and took it, and have worn it, like a king; and wheresoever I am sung or told in aftertime, this also shall be known: but now delay not, take Excalibur, and fling him far into the middle mere: watch what thou seest, and lightly bring me word.”

Awed as much or more by Morgan’s deathly solemnity as by her words, Judy mumbled, “I don’t understand, Your Majesty. I don’t know where it is.”

Then Morgan led her to a cabinet and showed her the sword.

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